Linux software support the shareware idea

This is an excerpt from a newsbit I posted earlier:

L4L: Who is funding your effort? If no one, how can people help you financially? Are you looking for other developers to join your Elive team?

No one is helping with the Elive developement. The only way to help financially is making donations, but people don't understand that a donation of just $5 could be very helpful, if many people do it. I don't work actually and I lost my daily full-time developing Elive. But I need to start searching for a real job soon because I need money. I don't have sufficient funds to buy a new machine for the high-level developement of Elive. people are asking for a future amd64 version of Elive but don't make the minimum donation for me to be able to buy this machine. ...

I believe that to boost independent Linux development efforts by individuals without commercial interest, the 'shareware' model should be adopted as the norm to encourage - or force - support obligations upon the community at large.

We all like the fact that we can obtain a truly great piece of software for free, but few of us actually think of contributing to its development in terms of remuneration. I would see nothing wrong if Linux publishers began to charge a small fee to "sell" their software to the public.

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