neorants

So today, I moved the NeoMail homepage to neomail.org. It’s about time, considering I’ve had the domain for what seems like forever now, thanks to the donation of a kind web host who noticed it expire, snapped it up, and gave it to me. Not only that, but I’ve stooped to asking for donations from people who use the software and like it, or make money from it. There are quite a few of the latter, a few of whom incorporated NeoMail in some commercial products and are making a nice profit. My friends all tell me I shouldn’t have open sourced it.

Well, hindsight is 20/20. Of course, I don’t really think that the first Neomail should have been a commercial product, or even just closed source freeware — I wanted to give something back to the open source community. Still, after seeing how difficult it is to manage an open source development effort (it’s hard to keep people on your vision for an app when they can do anything they please with it), I would probably give a second thought to a second open source effort.

In any case I would say it’s probably going to end up being too little, too late to accept donations now. My friends also told me I was stupid for not taking money from people who were asking me if they could send me a donation for my work way back when. I made a bit of money from two people. One paid for a customization. The other was from a foreign nation’s armed forces, and told me he didn’t feel right not giving up some of his government’s money for an app they would have paid a fortune for anyway. I still have a copy of the latter check — it’s so cool! Other than those two incidents, I didn’t make a dime. I actually enjoyed turning people who wanted to give me money away.

Yeah, that was pretty stupid.