I confess (again) I don't understand that angle: how it's possible to "run freeware as a business".
But it's not my concern (I almost said "business"
) to pry into such things. (I do remember Micah was similarly amazed by this in the Bluefire thread.)
It's true each of us needs to finance
somehow the things we hold dear in our life. My own way of doing it is thoroughly outlandish and unconventional, some would even say crazy (but that's off-topic).
Because neither you nor I are
directly selling our best efforts... the thing over which we spend most time on a daily basis... that's what
corporations do, after all, which is (perversely and ironically!) why their products are so crappy: they are crappy
because their employees are actually
getting paid for creating them...
Which reminds me of (I think) Schopenhauer's
definition of work: he said that only such activities can truly be called
work which you would perform even if you never got paid a single cent for performing them.
The things you do
only because you are getting
paid for them -- they are
not real work, but only a semblance of it, according to Schopenhauer. Which would explain, I guess, why Kindle, iBooks and their ilk are such crappy software products: because they are created by hordes of software professionals, who are getting
paid for creating them, but their
hearts are not in it... (
Because they are getting paid?) And the thoroughly mediocre results of their work indeed show that their hearts aren't in it -- the lack of love on the part of developers. Why would they deeply care about the quality, or lack of it, of Kindle, iBooks and their ilk, as long as the pay-check arrives on time, right?
As I was saying: because we are not
directly selling it, we must
indirectly finance it, at least for the time being, while the "time being" could well turn out to be
several decades, or even one's entire life-time. There may be
A Big Reward waiting at the end of the road -- or there may just be nothing. Who knows?
While it would definitely be
nice if there were
A Big Reward at the end of the road, it's not really necessary. The
main reward, after all (although not financial), is the
progress along the road.
The big question, of course, because we are
not directly selling our best efforts, is how
sustainable for the future such a model is. Will there be Marvin in 5 years from now? Or will it just vanish into thin air, like Stanza and Mobipocket Reader did, after bringing us joy for a few short-lived years? Amazon was the big magician, helping them disappear, gleefully.
My own model of financing my
main work may collapse within a year or two from today (and this has been true for me for
years now). I must count with that, and be always mentally prepared to accept such an outcome, if worse comes to worst. I have no idea if your own model of sustaining Marvin is similarly brittle, and I don't need to know. Let's hope it's a bit firmer, for the sake of all of us Marvin fans.
</end musings>