I would like to read some statistics about the successfulness of a
programmer taking donations for his software as opposed taking a
fixed fee. So the software is put on his site, people download and he
relies solely on donations coming in.
Actual stories of success or failure would also be of interest.
I want to know how much somebody doing this might get in percentage terms.

a notable example (probably the most successful donationware ever?)
would be bittorrent's author bram cohen.  from a jan 2005 wired
article (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/bittorrent.html):

He gets up in the morning, helps his wife feed their children, and
then sits down at his cord-and-computer-choked desk to watch his
PayPal account fill up with donations from grateful BitTorrent users -
enough to support his family. Then he goes online to see how many more
people have downloaded the program: At this rate, it'll be 40 million
by 2006.

Thanks for the comments so far. I'm amazed at this commenting
resource. I'm currently working - its daytime in France at the moment,
I'll have a good read later and post again.

Thanks again to all.
gupara-ga

Having looked a further into the links you've all helped me with I've lea

oops! learnt a lot.

Searching google for more info I find some horror stories. Here's one:


QUOTE
As of October 31, the person who has been donating my bandwidth will
be laid off of work and if I want the site to remain online, I'll need
to contribute way more than I have towards the ISP charges. The Daily
.WAV has always been a hobby for me, albeit an expensive one, it has
never been nor will be a source of reliable income. Any previous
donations and ad revenue always went back into running the site. My
bandwidth fees actually run $300.00 per month ? that doesn't even
count the cost of DVD/video rentals or purchases. This is not
something I can afford on top of my everyday bills.

I put up the Donation link about a year ago hoping that out of the
10,000 people a day who visit the site enough people would be able to
make a small donation to cover the cost of the site. As you can see
from the Donation Info page, it's never really come close. I am
extremely grateful to all who have donated in the past because even
though the donations didn't cover 100% of the costs, it still helped.

So I hate having to put this before all of you, but here's the bottom
line: I want to keep this as a free resource to you all. I'm not going
to turn it into a subscription service. I'm not going to go out and
get a bunch of popup or popunder ads. I'm not going to go through all
my old emails and harvest out addresses to sell to some spammer.

The Daily .WAV receives over 300,000 visitors a month. If even 1/10th
of those visitors were to donate a single dollar each, there would be
enough to cover the ISP costs for a year and perhaps even some
hardware upgrades. I am not comfortable in asking money from people.
But the honest truth is that without your support, The Daily .WAV will
cease to exist. If you have any questions, feel free to email me at

UNQUOTE

What a tale of woe >>>> a 1/10th and a single dollar<<<< and he would be O.K.
I think I'll choose a different route. Thanks mister2u-ga
solentechnologies-ga and visnup-ga for your input. It's been most
welcome.

gupara-ga