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!

Squeak on the BeagleBone

David Graham, the publisher of Adventures with Smalltalk and Robots, published a cool article about an experiment to run Squeak on the BeagleBone. 

It's really a very good and clear way to show the power of Smalltalk and objects interacting with the hardware while it's running.

Very cool David, I enjoy a lot this sort of experiments, a way of materialize the objects behavior.

Some data about the visits on PasswordsPro site in March 2012

Speaking with some fellows of MicroISV world, we talked about the importance or not of have localized version of our products (in languages other than English).

Then I decided to write these lines to show some real data of the visits on the website of PasswordsPro in the month of March 2012.

The first image show the origin of the site visitors, the dark green is from where more visitors come, in this case USA. (I settled my adwords campaigns on USA because is the country where I have more customers and sales).

Currently over 80% of users of PasswordsPro are from USA and the rest are divided between other English-speaking countries as Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain. Some countries that buy also, but are not native English speakers are Germany, Norway, Sweden, Brazil, Belgium, India, Spain and some other that I can stay on the shelf. Note that no Spanish speaker country, except for the users from Spain.

The next image show the average pages per visit, in this case 3,33. Is interesting to note that the visits with more pages per visit are from countries that currently are not buying licenses, as Algeria, China, South Africa, Colombia and Mexico. The people that effectively buy seems to be the people that less pages surf.

The next one is related with the previous and show the average time per visit, where China is the winner with great advantage, with more than 12 minutes average per visit. Again, the countries that effectively buy licenses have only an average of 2 minutes on the site per visit. Other "no-buying" countries as Egypt and Algeria also have high average per visit (Around 5/6 minutes). Strange to me.

Finally, the country where I make my major efforts is USA because is here where the customers are and the sales. In March I had visits for almost all the states and sales in a bunch of they also. Thanks to all the PasswordsPro customers!