An interesting experament, I have 65 freshmeat subscribers to the libferris project. Assuming that half of them are starving students on peasent level one income and that I'm subscribed to the project aswell this allows 32 folks who could possibly make a $10-$20 donation to the libferris project.

Now surely that money is not much and is laughable in comparison to what an experienced C++ coder with similar qualifications to myself could earn commercially on closed source but relatively speaking the potential $500/yr that a small donation from half my subscriber base would make to my current situation would be great. It also gives some warn fuzzyness that folks are getting what libferris is about.