Eric Wise

I think perhaps you might do better if you had a project that targeted developers as opposed to business people. I also doubt many OSS contributors make any real money through donations. The notoriety seems to be the real reward.

I'm sorry it doesn't seem to be going well for you right now.

So I ran a somewhat largish and somewhat-used library (Tao.OpenGl, Tao.*). Tao was a fairly large codebase, I inherited quite a bit from CsGL, which hand less than a handful of developers, then I rewrote it as Tao.* and added quite a bit. Tao still has less than a handful of developers, even though now it's under the Mono banner. You could argue it's kind of nitch stuff, but when I was running the website myself I was doing like 12GB of traffic a month. I can think of only about 4 contributors. 4. Of those two were/are quite productive, they're currently running things since I've moved. I tried the donations route for a while, I might have made like $150 total. I've not calculated that hourly, but I'm sure it is fractions of a cent per hour. My biggest headache was people bitching. I provided all this code and examples and whatnot and for the longest time, "make it buildable on mono" (it runs on mono, but at the time it was built using a VS 2003), so thinking I'd be nice it went over to Nant with the help of one of the contributors. Then it was "NAnt sucks, I want makefiles" or "NAnt sucks, I want VS2002 solutions". Ugh. That crap sucks. Or things like "I don't like your naming conventions, change them or I'll call you a poopy-face". It got to be such a major PITA. I've quite enjoyed my open source vacation since I moved. I really think for an open source project of any size to survive and not drive you crazy you have to enjoy the project and have 4-5 like-minded (and skilled) developers contributing *and* you have to ignore most of the feedback you get from 'the community'. Of course, I'm in the middle of starting work on another large open source project, though I'm being paid at work to do it. I guess I'm a glutton for punishment... :/

Well, maybe you could not make any money from this open source project. But if you do release a great application or tool, it definitely will help you build your reputation in this developer community. How much it worth?!