[G1 General] mghtyred:
It's a serious question.

When I released the MghtyMax series of Sense ROMs, I made it a point not to ask for donations. Not just because the bulk of the framework of those ROMs were Maxisma's code, but because I wanted to freely take as much knowledge as I was giving to the community.

I knew there were users who would want to give, and even got IM's asking where to send money. I always instructed them to send that money to their local food bank or homeless shelter.

Now that Klick has been tarred, feathered, and carried out of town on a pike, I must ask:

Assuming for a moment that Klick was guilty of copying other people's code (and I'm certainly not saying he is guilty, especially since I have not properly reviewed any evidence against him) would anyone have said word one if he hadn't been including a donation link in his posts?

There are some very successful developers here that have tens of thousands of users of their ROMs. At least one likely has over 100k users. Those users add up to a lot of donations. We're not talking chicken scratch here, but the potential to generate some serious capitol.

As with any business venture, an individual or company will go to great lengths to defend their income stream. When you are talking about proprietary designs, and copyrighted intellectual property, it's only natural for the owner of said designs or property to defend their work from imitation, alteration, and redistribution under a different brand/name.

However, we're not talking about private intellectual property here, are we? No, we're talking about open source code, released by the Android Open Source Project under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 generic license.

Even if he was indeed guilty of using someone else's base code, there was no law broken. So why all the hubbub?

Honestly, I think it was money.

When there is the potential to make thousands, tens of thousands, or possibly even hundreds of thousands of dollars in "donations", people are going to become very possessive of their "market share".

If donations to developers didn't exist, my guess is none of this bickering would be happening at all. One developer could happily take another dev's code, modify it, re-release it, and another dev could come along and modify that.

Nobody would complain because there would be nothing to lose. Developers would be releasing code for the sole purpose of enhancing the development community, instead of lining their pockets with currency.

Why would anyone care, as long as the code was being enriched, and the end result was better programming for all? Wasn't this the point of open development?

I know this post will be very unpopular with some, but I think we've let the money changers overrun the temple. I think this trend of asking for donations will only slow the open development of code, and encourage those with large followings to do what ever it takes to crush perceived competition.

The above paragraph may have just made me the pariah of the entire development community, but I really don't give a damn. I honestly believe the community would be far better off without money being involved at all. It is because of this belief that I encourage the management of XDA to permanently ban all requests for donations, be they for ROM development, APP development, or any other purpose.

I firmly believe that by removing money from the equation, we will see a much more rich and diverse development community, with developers willing to enjoy an open exchange of ideas.