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The Dollar Campaign For Thunderbird Devs
Robert Accettura writes "In a rather comical spirit, Seth Spitzer (of ex-Netscape fame) is asking Thunderbird users to donate one dollar (or about 0.77 if you're in Europe) to Scott and David, the lead engineers of Thunderbird. Unlike Firefox, with quite a large community submitting patches, Scott and David have been working with much less community aid, and still managed to deliver a very solid product. This is a little way to thank them for managing to do so much with so little to keep our inboxes free of spam and easy to use."
who really gives a flip about Thunderbird?
I do. That's three. I use it for imap.
With almost ten thousand people having used FreeBSD Update to download and install binary security patches, I certainly wouldn't mind getting $1 from each user. Right now I'm averaging around $0.1 per user -- most of which came from slashdot.jp readers who don't even use FreeBSD Update, and all of which went directly into buying new hardware for building the security updates.
Then of course there's my binary diff tool, which is being used by somewhere upwards of a million people, thanks to Apple's decision to use it for reducing the size of their security updates. (Ok, technically bsdiff isn't being used by all those people; bspatch is, however.) My total income from this? $0. I haven't earned a cent.
Am I bitter about not earning any money from all this? Of course not -- if I wanted to make money, I wouldn't have been giving this work away for free in the first place. On the other hand, I certainly wouldn't mind getting some monetary return for all my work.
And that's the important point to remember here: Almost all open source developers would love to get something for their work; but if they get anything, it won't be anywhere near $1 per user.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
I give a flip.
I use it daily for heavy e-mail use. Never crashes, works beautifully with both of my imap accounts. I don't see what you find so undesireable about it - I think it is a slim (getting there at least), well designed e-mail client that puts usability at the top of it's goals. I wouldn't trade it for any other client.