Open Projects, the financial side.

I love and believe in the open source, but happens that any person need the money to survive. No matter if was explained 1000 times, but open don't means free or, don't means that a developer developing open source software don't need money.

Many of open developers are financed by big companies that have a different scale business model, others by different sort of organizations, but others (as myself) need to administer very well the free time, to end up investing some (almost always few) hours to develop open projects, contribute with other open projects, write documentation, etc.

I know, is the backside of the open source world (and I really don't believe that the money may be made only by the support around the software. Or, if may be done, is another business, I'm a programmer, not a supporter).

This is a small thought of a sunday morning where I'm (again) trying to decide if invest my time in interesting open projects or do (boring) business stuff (As SEO optimizations, web sites updates, adwords campaigns, and many other things focused in have more sales of my closed product PasswordsPro).

Another side of the question is that if some of own open projects get some audience and are used by some people, they have needs....need new features, they need new versions and, of course, support....conforming a non easy equation for a (small and independent) open source developer.

With these thoughts in mind I decided to make here a list of open projects I'm working on and that I dedicate the time I can and also enable donations through PayPal to help me to spend more time on these projects.

The list of open projects I'm working on is:

Pharo in OpenShift: This is a project to make possible to run Pharo headless in the Red Hat Cloud PaaS OpenShift. I already proved that it's possible, but a lot of work is still needed to polish and automate the project using the DIY cartridge. Would be nice also that Red Hat could provide native support (I'm willing to help, of course!) for Smalltalk (Pharo / Squeak / Cuis) being that the Cog VM run smoothly here.

XMLRPC Support for Pharo: I need to port it to current 1.4 Pharo version and adapt to Zinc.

Crytography: We need to improve the Cryptography support in Pharo/Squeak/Cuis.

Pharo: I try to help (ok not much in the last times) in fix bugs and such sort of things.

Cuis: This is an argentinian project and I think is very promising in different aspects, but is needed adapt packages to run on it (As web servers, web frameworks, cryptography, and a long etc).

If you want to help donating some money (specially companies), here the button:

And it will be also in the specific pages of the projects.

Thanks for read!