To be or not to be

Whether 'tis nobler to produce code and make it perpetually free or to suffer the flames and indignity of making it commercial to perpetuate development...

In taking on the career move of working on the internet all day, I have a question that stands before me - how best to monetize my efforts. Open and Free software not only serves the community well, but it also serves the developers well. Most of the popular open source programs have taken advantage of their popularity by either selling links, using their link weight to support the commercial ventures or personal interests of the major developers, or something along those lines. There are a few projects that are still altruistic in their pursuits, but really for the most part, the free software community has evolved into the you don't get something for nothing community.

I'm no different really. I want to produce something, and I want something out of the deal for my efforts. I don't really see the point in selling any one of my utilities or programs for a few bucks. If I set a twenty dollar price tag on a given piece of software - I would need to literally sell thousands of copies for it to be worth the effort - and even then I'm tied into the support mechanism for the near future. I'm no internet sales guru, and what I do know tells me that I would be placing myself into a competitive market that I don't want any piece of. So read on and see how I can reconcile giving away my work and my unquenched thirst for money.

What I really want is to be a popular resource for the community. Popular enough that people listen to my opinions, visit my websites, value my efforts, and in general care about what I have to say. If I get all that, then I end up with a revenue source that hopefully I can live with - because on my various websites I'll have monetization systems in place - whether it be advertising revenue, a commercial effort of some kind, a donation drive, etc.

Giving away stuff is one way to get popular quickly - especially if I end up meeting an unfilled need or if I come up with something that genuinely signifies innovation. I definitely recognize this from the get-go, which is a good and a bad thing. The good means that I can plan accordingly and knowing full well what my intentions are I can potentially measure the performance of my efforts. The bad is that the whole idea is very cynical and it is in direct conflict with the ideals that I so much believed in at a younger age before the WWW ever came into being - back in the days when gopher was cool and archie was one of the coolest utilities around.

But really - what about moving forward - do I publish under an existing OSS license - BSD, GNU, Lesser GNU. And once I decide on a licensing model - do I open myself up to coding contributions? And If so, how do I manage that? Or do I follow along the lines of software like php-nuke where the code is free, but the development is handled by myself and a select group of developers (the other developers being me, myself and I for the moment :) ). This is something I really have to come to a decision on, but for the moment, I think I'll just look forward to receiving this headache when I actually have something to publish.