Have you considered making the fee voluntary for downloading the binaries?

I think this change in policy would greatly increase the popularity of OSX Portable Apps, so total donations might actually increase.

It may be costly to maintain the website, but mandatory fees seem out of sync with the spirit of Free Open Source Software.

How might FreeSMUG react if someone were to create binaries and make them freely available elsewhere?

I'd sincerely appreciate an official response to this query. Have searched for any prior discussion of this topic here, but have yet to find any results.

Thanks!
PrecisionTEQ Computer Support
http://www. PrecisionTEQ.com/

Please, consider that FreeSMUG (that is me) released and mantain 25 OS X Portable Applications, 20 of them freely available. These get about 250.000 dowloads [1] with 0 cent donation (even if I desire that donations [2] will be for applications developers and not for me).

No problem if someone build and share some unofficial Portable App binaries (as he respect GPL) with the hope that he can solve some issues as iCal and iChat compatibility with 10.5 or Portable Mail box search.



Sincerely I'm not worried about Portable App popularity as my target is to spread Open Source applications that can be freely downloadable here as Portable Firefox, Camino, Thunderbird, Adium, Sunbird, Cyberduck and more.



[1] http://tinyurl.com/5reh87

[2] http://www.freesmug.org/portableapps/donations/