a) Personaly, I don't mind if you ask money for this, as long as you promise to make it opensource and available after some time (for example, after 2 months, after collecting 1000€, when the daily income becomes small, etc...). In fact, this may work better since you'll have to motive to continue wokring on it.

b) It would be a nice test to have the app as opensource but yet provide it in OVI for money. There are people that will buy this and perhaps they will be more than the people that will get it from maemo.org. Also, not making the app available in extras (and keep it in extras-testing) may do the trick.

c) There is always the humble bundle paradigm, where you request for a donation before allowing someone to download it, but you don't specify the ammount. HB collecting more than 1 million dollars with that technique.

i say fock Ovi.... and No i did not add rude tags

A portrait keyboard wont work in all apps, mainly because all apps don't do portrait, so it'll only be useful in those apps that do support that orientation.

I disagree. If you remember the earlier version, the one which frals was contributing also, it had full-screen input-area. Thus one could type the text in portrait, even though the app itself wouldn't rotate to portrait. However, I do agree with the fact, that it'd be clumsy to use the new vkb in apps, that do not rotate, since the submitted text would still be in landscape after typing the text. Good example for this is the Conversations (SMS) app.

So in order to get full potential out of this app there'd need to be alternative Conversations app. I don't know, something like... Hmm, FastSMS?

realsportscar, just release it here. Anyone who's not willing to pay for it, f*ck them.

but be sure you keep working on it:-)
and the eventually flashproblem..

Wow so many post and advice!

So...the point seems to be that all people agree to pay something for
this but a closed source app seems to be a problem.

As I said, If a choose OVI way I will release the source after a bit.
When? Like someone said when sells goes down or when I reach a prefixed
amount. If people dislike OVI because it is slow, it is ugly etc etc I
could also consider things like "go with donation: people who donate will
receive it, when donations reach xxx euro I will release open". Perhaps
this way could be more easy also for me, and I don't have to manage with
nokia policies, no "costrained" support etc etc. The problem of this way is only one: how many N900's users read the forum? How many "external" will have it for free? The point is, if possible, I'd like to give it for free to "active community members" and sell to normal users. Perhaps I'm crazy

In addition consider that I'd like to share the code because I think that could be very helpful for
others developers, but I'm a student with a part-time job to pay
university tax...

No, it is not true...you can check my video: portrait keyboard in conversation (conversation doesn't support portrait, as you know).

I've used the PayPal-app in my iPod Touch when I have donated to some projects here at TMO. Pretty simple to use
Maybe it´s possible to create an app for maemo/meego where the developer can add the project with a donate-button.
And at the same time the app is connected to paypal for transfers.
A developer login and a paypal user login within the same app.

Dont know if it´s doable but it would be a tight connection between the developed project and the possibility to donate.

Just an idea...

Edit:
I wouldn´t mind donating for the new keyboard. But I would like to try it out first. I rarely use the vkb these days

fastsms already works with paypal. When you click "donate" you will be redirect to paypal and you have only to insert your login info and amount...

If you want try it you can download fastsms (from testing-repository), the keyboard is exactly the same. This evening I will post a video with all this in action.

Develop a version only for test takes too much time, time that I prefer use in solving bug or adding new features.

The said truth is that I don't think there is "enough" money to be made with applications for the n900. I would love to hear otherwise from some developer that has made "enough" money selling or asking for donations.

Unfortunately as bad as this is for the developers it is probably worst for the users. I would love to spend all my time enhancing my n900 applications and giving them away with source code included but just can't: the world out there expects me to pay bills with hard currency and not good karma.

Most of us here would like to have all the projects as open source. Also, most of us would be OK paying for developers to continue to work on useful applications.

In reality that is not how it works - very few people (me included) donate. I don't know if frals (fMMS) has a donate button but doubt that he has received enough donations after 1 million downloads.

At one point I thought a possible solution would be to have the maemo.org charge a "fee". The fee would give members access to applications, forums, support, ... Anybody contributing (developers, users answering questions, testers, ...) would get some back based on their contributions.

The community could also collect some more money with sponsors and ads on the web sites (and eventually on the applications - I hate me for suggesting that )

In my utopia the community would even have enough money to sponsor new applications like an "application installer" with user rating/feedback, application screenshots, ...

Just my 2ct.

I still don't get what it is with people saying that there are apps that don't support portrait on the N900...

There are apps that won't AUTO-rotate, but there's this magical combo of keypresses I like to call Ctrl+Shift+R... Just about everything stock on the N900 rotates perfectly, except calculator gets scrunched buttons. There are also apps, that when rotated, kinda suck - Media Player (but you're rarely typing in that thing anyway) and the stock App Manager (though there's FApMan), are two most obvious examples. But even App Manager can actually handle portrait mode fine on the actual lists - it just doesn't do the main screen correctly.

Seriously, in conversations, just Ctrl+Shift+R (or use ShortcutD and map that combo to, say, short-half-press of the camera key), and it'll rotate just fine. Yes, you have to do it every time you open it, but with ShortcutD it takes no time at all. And then the keyboard should be able to launch just fine, presumably. (Oh, there's CSS file changes you can use to reformat the Conversations layout so that it fits within the screen in portrait.)

Point is, some things might be a little messy in portrait, but if you can click on a text box, this should launch and work just fine.