Re: economic efficiency of free software

> OH MY WORD!

Forrest,

	Have you checked out the bug bounty programs that other
projects employ?  These programs are becoming quite popular and are
not too hard to implement, but still take time (and some money, if you
want to accept credit cards on line) .  

	FOSS project developers / managers are as time constrained as
anyone else.  If you developed a site to facilitate this one feature
of their projects in the least time consuming way possible, I think
that would be a start.  

> People who have an interest in particular software package,
> or a particular un-implemented feature, or a particular bug,
> could pay to have the web site promote the DB record of their
> interest closer to the top of its category page.

	Rather than require payment from developers, you could take
1%.  You could just accept various forms of payment and cut checks.  I
don't even know if that would be a unique site, just something
slightly different from what I have seen to date.

	Best of all, it's pretty simple and 100 percent virtual.  I
recommend paypros for merchant accounts (no monthly fee),
authorize.net as a gateway (10 per month approx), and any of a number
of interchange (www.icdevgroup.com) providers (15 bucks a month avg.).
You might need to take phone calls as part of the service.  Accessline
for a phone system is o.k. (15 per month).  So I project this at 100
per month plus your time.  This should market without advertising.

-Rich