A founder of the now infamous "The Pirate Bay" has started a new project which is aimed at changing the way content providers are paid called flattr. While another hand in my pocket doesn't exactly thrill me, once I got all the details on this project it turns out this is something I would definitely use.
In a nutshell you put money into an account and that money gets distributed evenly on a monthly basis to however many projects or developers you wish to give it to. So you put in $10 a month, and you sign up to contribute to 40 projects, and at the end of the month each of those projects would get a 25 cent slice of the cake.
While nobody is going to get rich off my tiny contribution of 25 cents a month I'm sure there are some popular projects out there which will be flattred by thousands or even 10's of thousands of loyal and thankful customers, which when combined with other means of income from the project such as advertising and services, may actually add up to enough to make a decent living from, and I have a feeling that flattr will end up itself being one of them.
This is definitely good news for open source content providers, I hope the system catches on.
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