A new and interesting business model for obtaining some financial gain from the development of open source software. It has been tried by Alex Shields (alias Zem) for some of the plugins of Textpattern.

• The developer creates the plugin, documents it and fixes a price, say 200 euros.

• An announcement is made that the plugin will be released as Open Source provided that the price is paid within a set period of time, say 60 days.

• If the time period expires and the price is not achieved, then the software is not released under an Open Source licence, and the amounts paid by the contributors are refunded.

Here is a link to the software ransom FAQ describing the system.