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Next, I decided I may as well give it away for free to bring more traffic into my site, and eventually decided to release it under the GPL.

At some point, after receiving many emails asking for help installing it (not everyone who knows how to make a web page knows how to set up a PHP script), it occurred to me that I could give people the option of hiring me to install it for them. A number of people have done so, and I've gotten some custom work from some of them too. I also get great ideas for improving the product when people ask to have it do things it can't do yet.

Has this experience convinced me to GPL anything else I've written? No. I do have a few other little things I'm giving away free, but I also have a number of products that I won't be releasing that way. Some I previously distributed as shareware, and found that very few people were willing to pay even a very small registration fee. So I switched to giving away a somewhat crippled demo version and requiring payment for the full version.

I guess the moral of this story is that if a enough users of a product will need someone to set it up for them, and if the price you can charge for setting it up is comparable to what you'd sell it for if you sold it, open sourcing the product can work well. But I don't think open source is the right model for everything--not unless you already have all the money you need and are just developing products for fun.

So if you want to help a poor Mac (and Linux, for my servers) user who can't afford to upgrade to Jaguar, go to this website and make a donation! (or buy something).

Shameless, I know. Shame is too expensive for my budget.

Slashdot may give you news 20 minutes in advance, but The Next Week Times, the psychic journal, gives it to you a week in advance!

</shameless self promotion>

Back on December 13, I got a message from SETI@Home (which I too USED TO be running) talking about expanding their search. As I remember it, that was a day or two after California had had a stage 3 energy alert--where reserves had dropped below 1.5% of capacity, and they were about to start rolling blackouts, cutting peoples' power off for 90 minutes at a time. They were also talking about (or did?) requiring some big energy consumers like Intel to turn their lights down to half their normal brightness or something. So you can understand that I was less than impressed to hear that the project that's already burning through how many trees a day? (I heard it once a long time ago) was expanding its efforts. Don't let the rhetoric about "spare cycles" fool you--a lot of the computers running this thing would be off or in low power mode if they weren't. I know, I once had 3 computers running it that would have been off.

Yes, if we found a signal proving there was intelligent life out there, it would be significant (though as others have mentioned, probably not exactly USEFUL since it would take so long to send a message back), but keeping the lights on and the environment clean are useful too.

Anyway, on December 13, inspired by the email from SETI@Home, I wrote up a little "message received from outer space" news story and posted it to one of my web sites.

Cool idea, though the quality of the results varies a bit (some very funny). Kinda reminds me of something I recently set up on my Doodle web site: Add-on Stories. They can either be based on one of my Doodles, or based on the writer's own idea. Each story can have mutliple threads branching at any level, and you can always click a link that will show you the full story along one thread, or multiple alternatives at a particular level.

It's pretty new, so there's not much there yet. Perhaps you could change that...

</shameless self-promotion>

Cool idea, though the quality of the results varies a bit (some very funny). Kinda reminds me of something I recently set up on my Doodle web site: Add-on Stories. They can either be based on one of my Doodles, or based on the writer's own idea. Each story can have mutliple threads branching at any level, and you can always click a link that will show you the full story along one thread, or multiple alternatives at a particular level.

It's pretty new, so there's not much there yet. Perhaps you could change that...

</shameless self-promotion>

Cool idea, though the quality of the results varies a bit (some very funny). Kinda reminds me of something I recently set up on my Doodle web site: Add-on Stories. They can either be based on one of my Doodles, or based on the writer's own idea. Each story can have mutliple threads branching at any level, and you can always click a link that will show you the full story along one thread, or multiple alternatives at a particular level.

It's pretty new, so there's not much there yet. Perhaps you could change that...

</shameless self-promotion>