What would you pay for? Should CFEclipse still be free?

Before I start, don’t worry, I am not going to charge for CFEclipse, but I have been thinking about the costs involved in making CFEclipse and trying to see how I can at least raise a small percentage of those.

To give you an idea of how many developer hours that go into CFEclipse, add up 2-3 man hours a day, every day, for about 6 years (I am using an average of number of developers that have been involved as well as frequency of coding), and lets say, they get paid a fair rate for a Java programmer (about ?40 an hour I think), thats about ?262,800 (thats about $516,402).

Sit back and take that in, Half a million dollars…That is a hell of a lot of money on the development of a product isn’t it? Maybe I am exaggerating a bit, but we have been going for 3 years, there have been roughly 5 developers doing a lot more than 2-3 hours a day so I think its a fair approximation.

I wanted to thank the community for the donations I got so far, which has managed to pay for the hotel and flights to cfObjective, but it has got me thinking about how we can make this a viable project.

I still personally don’t understand how the Eclipse Foundation itself makes money, so I am wondering how we can do the same:

Paid support might be an option, but this isn’t my full time project (yet!) so I can’t dedicate that much time on it yet.

Banner adverts, ick! I don’t think we get enough traffic to the site to really make any dent.

Donations, always good but I feel kinda bad asking for those.

A paid “Pro” version. I dont like this, since it involves offering support too.

The other way could be that if you want to download the plugin, you have to pay for it, if you want to build it yourself, you can have it for free (fits the license too). But that doesn’t really cut the mustard.

So, apart from a benefactor coming in and dumping money on the project (which if you really think about it, it would mean that that benefactor also needs to make money from the project so its just delaying the inevitable of it becoming a paid for product) does anybody have any other ideas out there?