Would you turn down $735G’s

Jan 15th, 2008 | By Steven Hodson | Category: Technology

Paint.NET Or better yet would you turn down up to $30K per month just to include a bit of code in your program’s installer?

Rick Brewster did on both accounts and he has my utmost respect because of that; especially the second part. If you don’t know who Rick is that is okay because chances are if you area Windows user you at some point or another have heard of Paint.NET a graphics program build on the .NET Framework. Now if you haven’t heard of Paint.NET then head over here and grab yourself a free - as in beer - copy of the program.

As great as the program is that is not the object of this post. What is though is the fact that at some point last June Rick was approached by a company that was interested in purchasing a stake in Paint.NET. As Rick tells it:

Back in June if you had asked a certain company who was interested in purchasing a “stake” in Paint.NET, then it’s worth about $1.5 million based on the download rates at the time. So that would have been $735,000 in my pocket to sell a 49% “stake”. They wanted to make a “professional” version, and I told them their idea was boring

When he told the company that they countered with an offer of $25K to $30K per to:

if I just put a page in the installer that by default would set the user’s web browser home page to their search engine unless the user un-clicked the checkbox (it would be Paint.NET branded though! which takes, umm … an 8kb PNG and 20 characters of HTML?). It was very, very tempting but eventually I told them no. It just made me feel slimy all over. I made a rule a very long time ago that I’d never let Paint.NET turn into something that I wouldn’t want to install myself, and this would have violated it.

It is at this point Rick really garners my respect. As hard as it may be to turn down the lump sum it is even harder to turn away from a monthly dividend that is worth more than some people make in a year. Many a developer has let themselves be convinced that this isn’t such a bad way to earn an income but Rick wasn’t swayed from his core belief by the easy money and for that he get’s my high five.

I am not that big of a user of Paint.NET but I have always had a version installed most of the time since back in its early pre version 1 beta releases so I guess it is about time that I coughed up a donation if only to say way to go Rick. So Rick .. some time next month you can look for a few more dollars to add to your month donations receipts along with a big thanks.

[tags]Paint.NET, graphics, paint programs, photo editors, graphics editor[/tags]