My project would be open source but for profit
My experience, having had an open source project for nearly a decade, is that it's very hard to make money with open source. Open source software is free software, and that means people aren't paying for it, and, annoyingly enough, people are too lazy to RTFM and expect you to answer their email with their support concern or implement whatever pet feature they want "for fun and for free". A lot of web boards out there are filled with free software users with a pretty strong "entitlement mentality"; people who don't contribute to open source but think open source developers should give them a program with the features they want without being paid a cent for their hard work. I have blogged about this quite a bit: http://maradns.blogspot.com/search/label/freetards The way I handle people like that is by making it crystal clear I do not provide unpaid email support; if you want private email support, have your credit card ready. Some people ignore all of the warnings on the web page with my email address so I have a simple script which sends people like that a canned reply asking for money and telling them I will forward any further email they send me to a public mailing list unless they have already paid me. When people ask for features, I handle them in email by giving them the canned reply; if they request features on the mailing list, I ask them how much they are willing to pay for said feature, or give them the "I'm married and don't have time to implement more features for free" spiel. If you know of a way I can keep my program open source and make money on it, I am all ears. I have made a little money implementing features people want, but not nearly enough to pay the rent. It's mainly a way of putting up a boundary with users who want me to go broke programming for them for the rest of my life without me ever getting paid for my work. - Sam