As a follow up to the announcement 3 days ago that Radical Breeze applications (including RadicalCodex and Radical Comic Designer) were being released for free, I figured I’ll lay out my overall plan here of how, exactly, this is going to work.

I’m going to be setting up some way to let all of you submit, and vote on, feature requests (and bug fix requests).  Something along the lines of IdeaTorrent, which is what Ubuntu Brainstorm uses — and it seems to work pretty well.

Then I’ll be setting up a publicly available Trac install for each application.  That way there will be a nice central spot for people to look at progress and grab the latest code.

Then, when people go and donate, they can specify which project (or even which specific bug/feature request) they’d like the funds to go towards (or they can just let the donation be added to the general pool used for all development).  This can either be done by leaving a comment when you make the donation, or by simply sending in an email.

The general approach, right now, is this:  Every $20 donated is equal to 1 hour of solid coding time.  At least that’s how I’ll represent it in graphs to allow us to see how well the donations work in a “real world – developers have to eat” sort of way.

This way we can see the real, direct benefits of the donations.  And allow the poor developer (*cough* me *cough*) to  be able to afford continued improvement of the software.

I will be keeping a running tally of donations and posting that information each month.  I’d also like to put the name (or nick-name) of the top donators up somewhere.  Perhaps in the about box of the applications, or maybe on the donation page.

All this is happening pretty quickly.  I don’t have a set schedule for most of this, but I expect most of it to be fully in place over the next few days (Linux applications can be downloaded and used for free already, and donations can be made right now.).

So if you like the software, and like the idea: Head over and donate.  Let’s get this ball rolling!