I'm looking for feedback on my ideas and any other ideas any of you might have. My ideas and thoughts about them are below.
- Donations - I've done this in the past. It isn't much, but every little bit helps.
- Selling support - I'm not sure how this would work. Would I sell yearly support, per-incident support, or both? Would it be per-company, per-site, per-user? What would the scope be limited to? Installation, configuration, and usage support? Bug fixes? New features? How much should I charge?
- Bug and Feature Bounties - Would one person say, "I want feature X and I'll pay Y dollars for it", or would many people be able to donate toward a bug fix or feature request almost like Kickstarter? How would the required amounts be figured out? When would people have to pay? What if the bug fix or feature wasn't possible, or didn't live up to people's expectations?
- Paid version - There are commercial Telnet/SSH and VNC components that would work better than PuTTY and VncSharp. mRemoteNG Pro could bundle those commercial components. The source code would still be released, but you would need a license from the component vendors to use it. A standard version using PuTTY and VncSharp would still be maintained. My concern here is development of the PuTTY and VncSharp parts of mRemoteNG would probably lag behind. I'm also not sure of how the community would react to this. Keep in mind that the original mRemote used a commercial VNC component, although mRemote was still given away for free.
- Advertisements - I have already added ads to the mRemoteNG website and plan on adding them to the forum. I will keep them minimal (in number) and unobtrusive.
None of these ideas are set in stone. I really want your feedback. Any other ideas would be great too.