I love Open Source. I love the "free speech" aspect of it, and I would lie if I said the "free beer" part didn't attract me.

Still, as a non-developer I occasionally get a pang of guilt about just using the fruits of their loi^H^H^H labour. Hence my proposal:

Couldn't we set up a kind of volunteer piggy bank, where people could drop cash as a token of appreciation for the work on their favourite ports/applications? No strings attached, obviously; this is by no means an attempt to gain control over their work.

An example: I use FBReader and Gnumeric a lot (and I would use Abiword all of the time -- hint! hint!) and I would gladly donate 10 to 30 euros if I knew this would help the developers -- er, well, developing.

I'd do this myself, were it not for the fact that I'm moving to Thailand within two months and that Thailand is not PayPal's friendliest country. I mention PayPal, because I figure that would be the obvious way to set this up (don't kid yourself: There's a lot of thinking and working involved before this thing would work properly).

Crazy idea or are there people thinking now: This doesn't sound thàt insane.

While, a very good idea, but a shared bank/account causes many problems; who’d manage it? How the money is distributed? How the payouts are prioritized? And many more issues.

I know not all available applications are hosted by Maemo Garage, but what if each project page over there had a Paypal or Google account attached for donations to your favorite application?

Amazon also runs some sort of similar thing, IIRC. Probably best to handle it on a per-app basis.

My N800 was unpacked all of two minutes ago. Give me a little time, here

I like the idea of PayPal buttons -- whether in the Garage or maybe on the maemo.org applications pages. Of course, this implies that the developers have to set it up themselves, but what if they're too shy to ask for money?

Oh, Alexandyr: No rush. If I have it by tomorrow morning, it's fine.