Donation model

Recently Matt Kruse the author of Social Fixer published a blog on why he likes the donation model for his software.  I started thinking about this again as it might apply to products that agility people provide.  If someone provided a free download I would gladly donate money to them if I liked the product.  I would do this for two reasons.  My first reason would be to compensate the person for their work in producing the product and secondly to encourage them to continue producing more products.

I think that there would still have to be some sort of copyright on the product to prevent other people from making money from it. 

In today's world it is easy for people to copy or even rent out DVDs.  The authors/producers are not being compensated.  I would like to see a world where people want to compensate the authors/producers for their work.

Some people in the music industry are providing free downloads and asking for donations.  Some are having better success than others.  I would like to think that dog trainers are different from the masses that download music.  We reward our dogs when they do something we like so that they will keep doing it so why wouldn't we reward people as well. We might even jackpot people (i.e. donate more than what the person was expecting).