I have a relative around that age who knows a lot about the Xbox and iPad. I remember from my Commodore 64 days how these machines were not "walled gardens" and how I could start programming in BASIC as soon as I turned my Commodore 64 on. So I looked for some programming books for him.

I looked at a lot of books. I suggest cursorily flipping through the first few chapters of books you consider. It came down to two books, I don't recall what the second choice would have been. I picked Invent your own Computer Games with Python. Why? Because Python is a good tool to teach kids a language, but it is also used for real stuff out in the world, it is not a toy language like BASIC. Because kids are interested in games at that age, and with this they can program their own. And because it is basically written for kids and beginners - it is not a "learn Python" book for someone like me, who already knows C, C++, Java, PERL etc. and is just picking up one more language.

I bought a hard copy of the book, but it is also online for free on their website. He mainly uses an iPad, so I installed a free SSH client for iPad so he can ssh into an account I created on my web server and run Python. My web server had an old version of Python, so I installed a local copy of the latest Python and redid the PATH for the account to hit the local python binary first.

I'm still mulling how he can edit programs. I used nano (and vi) when I first was showing him, but might download scp for iPad and an editor for iPad, so he can scp the programs. I want to make it as easy as possible, and he can learn harder stuff later.

Aside from the book needing Python 3, which just made me have to do a little work, so far so good with the book.

Last year Linux celebrated its 20 year anniversary, as Linus began writing it in 1991 and released it that same year. For myself, I'd have to think more deeply about it to determine exactly what year I first started using Linux, but it was definitely between 1993 and 1995. I installed my first Linux on a non-brand-name laptop with the Slackware distribution. It required many, many 3.5 inch disks to install (I forget how many disks it was if you wanted to install X-Windows - it was a lot). It used LILO as the boot loader.

My next Linux desktop I began using in February 1996. It was at a small startup - so small actually that initially the machine doubled not only as my desktop, but as a server of sorts. The machine had a pre-1 kernel, but the previous sysadmin upgraded it to Linux 1.X the first day I began working. The /proc/meminfo file in Linux had recently had a cached column added to it, which broke top and some other things, although the previous sysadmin dealt with that snag as well. FVWM was my window manager. The machine was susceptible to the "ping of death", and this was before firewalls, NAT, iptables and the like were widespread in use.

Linux as a desktop has come a long, long way since then. Even in the past few years, the Linux desktop has come a long way. A lot of people have done work on this, but Ubuntu has been a big part of this, and is what I currently use on my desktop. One example - when installing my new Ubuntu system, it sets up what is necessary to get the disks and network connection in order, and then it simultaneously starts downloading needed packages from the Internet while I go through the rest of the system setup menus. If I finish all the setup before everything is finished downloading, I can cycle through a promo which shows me which features Ubuntu has. This is the kind of thinking that has been needed for Linux on the desktop - every previous Linux install I remember consists in me doing system setup, and then I have to wait for the downloads to start and finish. Even though it is a little more of a pain to implement from the developer's point of view, Ubuntu gets those downloads started as soon a possible, and I don't have to wait that extra time that I'm doing the rest of the system setup - and if I finish before the downloads, I have a promo to look through where I can learn about the system. Not a big thing, but an example of the kind of thinking needed.

To a point others have addressed - nowadays there is server, desktop, laptop, tablet and smartphone. Linux is dominant on smartphone, and has a very healthy-sized chunk of tablets. With the Nook, the Kindle Fire, as well as the pure Android tablets like the Samsung Galaxy Tabs, the Xoom etc., and this year Ice Cream Sandwich tablets coming out, I'm confident Android (and thus Linux) will grab more of the tablet market. What I have not seen mentioned here (maybe I missed it) is that tablets sales have been cannibalizing desktop sales, and the traditional desktop is growing less relevant over time for the average consumer. Just like people here are saying desktop Linux is mostly only relevant for techies like us, in the future desktops may become mostly relevant only for techies like us, or people doing things like 3d modeling and the like. With a Bluetooth keyboard (foldable or solid) and a tablet, you can already do a fraction of what the desktop can do, and that will only increase with more powerful tablets, new software and so forth. And Linux is a big player in this domain. I think the efforts to improve desktop Linux are good, but I think efforts to promote Linux are currently more productive in the areas where it already has a significant position: servers, smartphones and tablets.

Right now Apple and Android are in a real race for dominance over smartphones and tablets, and Windows is throwing its hat in the ring with Windows 8. I think Microsoft realizes it has lost the smartphone race for the next few years, and will be concentrating on tablets, where the race is still open to some extent. I'm sure their tablets will come with Word, Excel and so forth, which will give them an edge in this space. The app which can do some Word/Excel functionality on Android, Documents to Go, costs $29.99. And people need it, it has over half a million purchases. There is really no good, say, open source Excel-compatible spreadsheet for Android right now. I should know, I wrote the most complete open source Excel-compatible spreadsheet for Android that is out there right now. And "most complete" is strictly in a relative sense - it is really a prototype that I put aside once I hit the stumbling block of trying to load Excel 2007/2010 OpenXML files (it can do pre-2007 though). It has had some interest from other developers, but interest has not been that high. Anyhow, in terms of efforts to promote Linux, you want to concentrate on the more productive channels. I think it is good to push forward on all channels, but I think writing software (even non-FLOSS!) for Android tablets is currently the best place to concentrate efforts from a purely promotional standpoint.

With regards to the ticketing system - if someone posts a ticket for a problem, see if you can reproduce the problem with their particular version. See if the problem still exists in the head of the latest code trunk. See if the problem is a duplicate of another problem. See if the problem is with the program, or somewhere upstream, say, a library that the program depends on. If so, report the problem upstream.

Core developers are busy, and most projects can use people who deal with and clean up tickets, leaving only real problem tickets to deal with. Also, sometimes a program or library from Gnome or freedesktop.org will have tickets in the trouble ticket systems of Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, SLES, Gentoo etc. Someone doing a little coordination will be helpful.

The thing is, even top notch programmers unfamiliar with a large program are initially at a disadvantage to a middling programmer who is well-familiar with a large program. Everyone is initially at a disadvantage when a program breaks, no matter what the skill level. But even if your programming skill level is very low, most projects can benefit from extra help. Even if you just confirm a bug exists on your system too, or that you can't reproduce a bug - this helps core developers save time.

There is something of a slope of what FLOSS in an organization is, from Richard Stallman, who is a purist, all the way to companies which will use (but not contribute) Apache/BSD source in their code, or run a GPL application.

I've used FLOSS associated with my job for a long time. From the mid 1990s on this was as a Unix Systems Administrator. I've installed Linux (and back then, FreeBSD also) servers at companies since the mid 1990s. I've installed open source software like Apache, BIND for DNS, and Tomcat. Various mail packages like sendmail, exim, qmail. Some of the comments mention small companies, but I've installed and/or maintained open source tools in everywhere from small startups to Fortune 50 companies.

Also, over the past year I have learned the Android API better, and Android is, of course, an open source platform. My entire development process for Android is very open source based. I do development on an Ubuntu Linux desktop with the open source IDE Eclipse. I also often include Apache code in my code, or sometimes LGPL, or sometimes even GPL code. I even released Android open source - I was building a spreadsheet, got pre-2007 Microsoft Excel (.xls) loading OK, but hit a snag with Excel 2007/2010 (.xlsx), so I open sourced what I had so far ( https://github.com/dennis-sheil/android-spreadsheet ) and will do some more work on it if I have the time.

I released several of my own Android apps over the past year. You're talking about making money on this - I made over $15 in ad views yesterday. Not enough to earn a living, but an extra couple of hundred dollars a month does not hurt. Some independent Android developers have put up blogs, like Droid Blog, or Kreci, or others, they've been doing it longer than me and are making thousands a month, not hundreds.

Plenty of people have written advice on how to push for open source solutions at a company. Just suggesting often it isn't going to do the trick, you have to package it in a certain way, get buy-in from the stakeholders and so forth. You might not always succeed, but sometimes you will.

...on smartphones and tablets, particularly Android and its derivatives.

Cut the Rope is 99 cents with at least half a million downloads. There are two unknown factors - how many returns were there (downside) and how many over 500k are they (upside). So they've made around $500,000 on this app.

GTA III on Android - 4.99 and over 100,000 downloads - another $500,000 in revenue. And a lot of the graphics and engine code was already written.

I had a chat with one of the Big Mountain Snowboarding developers ($2.99 times 5000+ is $15,000, plus an ad-based Android version with over 500,000 users) who told me that over 85% of the C++ and OpenGL code from their iPhone version could be reused in their Android version. Companies with an existing C++/OpenGL code base don't have to re-invent the wheel to get on Android.

Fruit Ninja : $1.26 * 500,000+ = $630,000. Doodle Jump: $0.99 * 500,000+ = $500,000. Madden NFL 12: $4.99 * 100,000+ = $500,000. And so on. Then there's the money games make on their free, ad-based versions. As I said, many of these games have existing C++/OpenGL code on another platform, so the half million in sales, plus more in ads, that they've made thus far, is money they made just for the port. Which also helps keeping you in the game if some competitors want to take these established games on in this newer platform.

Android is a Linux kernel, with the rest of its code open source. Tim Bird and others recently started an effort to bring the Android developers and Linux closer together, so hopefully that will bear fruit.

I develop for Android and own a Samsung 10.1" Galaxy (Android) tablet. I know someone who owns an iPad.

Several months ago, I wanted to give them SSH access to a server. So I looked at what iPad had to offer. I could find no free SSH client (as of a few months ago). Not even an ad-supported one. The best I could come up with was a nagware one - it allowed you 500 or so SSH keystrokes and then logged out and asked you to buy the client.

Meanwhile on my Android tablet, I have a free SSH client. It doesn't even have ads, it's open source! ConnectBot. There are other free Android ssh clients as well, but ConnectBot works for me so that's what I know.

Admittedly, I know more about Android than iPad. But the one thing I ever needed from iPad, I couldn't get for free. On Android I could. So which would I want to own more?

And as I said, I develop Android apps. If there was no good free SSH app for Android, I could have developed one. But there was one - ConnectBot. ConnectBot has no ads, but I would have been perfectly happy to have used a free SSH app with ads.

There are many revenue models for applications. Most of the top free apps have various alternative methods of getting revenue - and not just the apps like Facebook or ESPN Sportscenter. Ads are just one method, there's also upselling, and other revenue models.

At the end of the day, the real question is not what's good for the developer, but what's good for the customer? We have a platform that is developer-friendly but not user-friendly, it's called the Linux desktop. I like platforms that are good to developers, but there are many ways Android is good to developers that Apple is not. It costs me $25 for life to publish and Android app, without any application approval process (not $99 to $299 a year like Apple). I can publish the app anywhere, not just Apple's walled garden App Store. I can write and compile my app on Linux, Windows, Mac or whatever - I don't have to buy a Mac and then get Xcode. And it's not no one ever buys Android apps - some apps have made millions of dollars in sales (that we can see - in-app sales, ad revenue etc. is less visible). The revenue model just depends on the particular app.

1) You can develop from any platform. I develop on my Ubuntu 11.10 desktop. But you can also develop on Windows, MacOS or other Linux flavors. With iOS, you have to buy a Mac to start developing

2) It costs $25 to publish on Android Market for life. And you don't even have to - there's no "walled garden" like iOS has. The App Store has an annual fee which is $99 - with an even larger fee for the "enterprise program" whatever that is. (Speaking of Android's $25 fee, Admob just sent its first check to my Paypal account today for $22.95. So once they send me another $2.95 I'll be in the black. Actually I've already earned more than that extra $2.95 on my Admob account - they send you the money 6-8 weeks after earning it if you've accumulated $20 or more.

3) With Android, most non-game development is done in Java. A language many people know. With iOS, development is done in Objective C, a language that is not used outside of Apple-world anywhere near as much as Java. Objective C seems obscure to me - I have some written code at one time or another in C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, Common Lisp, Basic, PHP and probably some languages I'm forgetting, but have never had cause to use Objective C. It might be a perfectly fine language, but I'm stuck having to learn not only iOS's SDK, but a new language I'll probably never use again. Java I've used before Android, and would be useful to know even if I stopped programming for Android. Of course, with some wrappers, Android will do C++ (and OpenGL) code just like iOS will.

4) Android is open source. It has derivative products like Cyanogenmod and the Kindle Fire. Instead of just getting hardware one company decides on, we can get a range of products from a number of manufacturers. This has a downside in addition to the upside, but I think the upside outweighs it.

5) Android smartphones have been outselling iPhones in past months. It seems like a trend that has taken hold. As far as the tablets, obviously Apple dominates. But I'm happy with my Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1". I'm sure the ICS tablets will be even better. As far as Android users spending money, just with some basic math I can see some apps have made millions of dollars. Slingplayer mobile (does DVR stuff) has made at minimum $1.5 million. Beautiful Widgets has made at least $1.4 million. ATOK, which makes a more Japanese-friendly keyboard, has made $1 million. I haven't looked much at the games, I understand some of those have made money as well. The number of people with Android smartphones keeps growing, as do the quality of the phones, as do the quality of the apps - some apps are making millions, but more apps will probably make millions as well.

You are correct that untargeted ads are worth less, and my sense is with yours that game advertising is worth less as people go into a game app to play a game, not click ads.

You imply, or an implication can be drawn, that this is so throughout Android, but I have not found it to be the case. I have two apps that use Admob. One is an app used by many bartenders, bouncers and so forth, and I've found the Admob ads often reflect that line of work. Another app is a database app and I've found the Admob ads often advertise database-related things. So it is somewhat targeted - people who work with databases download my database app, get database-related ads, and click them when the ad interests them enough. I'm sure with Google's purchase of Admob that they're working on future versions which will probably be more targeted - I know they already do targeting by geographical location.

I think I'll take your mention of OpenOffice off on a tangent to do a little plug of my free software project...

A few months ago, I began the process of trying to port Apache POI to Android. For those who don't know, Apache POI is "the Java API for Microsoft Documents". It does Word and Excel, and also tries to implement other Microsoft formats, with various degrees of success.

I decided to start with a spreadsheet. I spent two weeks writing some scaffolding for a spreadsheet in Android. When I got it to where it looked good enough, I began working on loading Excel files with POI. And I could do so - with Excel xls files up to 2007. When I tried to load Excel 2007 and 2010 xlsx files, I ran into some problems...a topic which I'll get back to in a moment. Anyhow, I worked on trying to load Excel 2007/2010 xlsx files for a few more weeks, and when I saw I wouldn't, without luck, make any immediate breakthroughs, I put it aside. A few months later I open sourced my code on Github and cursorily described my 200/2010 problem in the README file. If anyone wants to look at it, feel free. As I said, I worked on features for two weeks and then got hung on one the 2007/2010 xlsx problem. The one big feature I did not include in the spreadsheet is the ability to finger swipe through the spreadsheet rows and columns - you can look around the spreadsheet with the arrow buttons on old, old Android phones and the Android emulator, but I spent all my time working on Excel 2007/2010 xlsx instead of features like that. It's only two weeks worth of work (plus the 2007/2010 xlsx work), and that minus my last six months of Android knowledge, but it's decent enough for what it is.

I sent a message to the POI mailing list after posting the code on Github. One of the POI dev's made a suggestion as to what to do - strip all non-Excel functionality from the schemas file - but that was what I already had for the most part done. I say for the most part because I probably stripped more than 80% of the non-Excel code. Why did I need to do this? Because Android Dalvik executables have a 65,536 method limit, and with all the Apache POI XSSF required libraries to do Excel 2007/2010 xlsx files included, my program would exceed that limit. Now there are two paths to get around this. One is the easier path - strip 100% of the POI stuff unneeded for Excel compatibility from the POI schemas jar. But I already stripped the low hanging fruit of this, and whittled 80+% of that stuff from the schema. Unless the other

Anyhow, back in July, when I stripped 80+% of the low-hanging fruit non-Excel schema and it was still a no-go, I put this aside and began working on other Android projects. In October I began thinking about this, and realized I was not going to get back to it in a while, so I cleaned it up (a little bit) and put it up on Github under the Apache 2.0 license (POI is Apache 2.0 so I figured I'd just use that as well), and posted to the POI mailing list.

I've had enough Android projects, and non-Android projects and things to distract me from returning to this. If my attention was turned to this again, the first thing I would do would be to repeat my 80+% non-Excel POI schema cleaning with the latest POI trunk (or last released jar, or whatever) and make my results public on a web page, or the POI mailing list or something. I would try to get it from 80%+ to 85+% and up to 100% clean of everything unneeded. If that didn't work, I would see if I could strip stuff from some of the other jar's, like xmlbeans or something.

If all of this didn't work, I would go the way of two Dalvik executable files in one Android project. With custom class loading, an interface for each needed method and all of that. An effort I seriously doubt I would start on my own - but who knows? If others were interested in this, I might put some more time and effort into it when I can. It would be nice to have a free software Excel-compatible spreadsheet for Android. We could make it open document format (ods) compatible as well - although that would mean more methods! Honestly, I haven't looked at the ODF stuff much with regards to it. If anyone's interested, I put the link to the Github page above.

...the one-eyed man is king, is something Desiderius Erasmus once said.

You may consider the metric "worthless". But as I said, "Hits to Wikipedia is not a perfect metric, but if anyone knows of a better one I'd like to hear it." I noticed you offered no metrics of your own. People who want metrics would probably settle for Wikipedia statistics over nothing. The only metrics I can find from this article are from the web logs of Distrowatch. I'll choose a metric from the logs of a web site that Alexa says is the 6th most popular in the world over one the logs from a website mostly used by a much smaller number of Linux aficionados.

Let's look at a better popularity metric - what percent of which OS hit the servers of Wikipedia in October 2011.

Ubuntu was 0.41% of all Wikipedia traffic with roughly 16.9 million hits in October. Mint was 0.01% of Wikipedia traffic, with roughly half a million hits in October. Ubuntu traffic dwarfs Mint traffic by many multiples.

In terms of the popularity of Linux distros hitting Wikipedia: Android was #1. Ubuntu was #2. Fedora was #3, just barely surpassing SuSE which is #4. Debian was #5. Mandriva was #6. Then comes along Mint at #7. In fact, Mint is barely even beating Kubuntu. Hits to Wikipedia is not a perfect metric, but if anyone knows of a better one I'd like to hear it.

Things can change, and Mint may be gaining popularity, but we have to be realistic about things. I like a lot of things about Debian and Trisquel, but I'm also aware of the fact that for every Debian desktop hitting Wikipedia, there are 20 Ubuntu desktops hitting Wikipedia, including my own. That number goes to 1:30 for Mint to Ubuntu. So no, Mint will not be surpassing Ubuntu any time soon.

I have an app on the Android Market which is not that popular relative to others in its category, I submitted it to Amazon, and they wanted me to tweak it (mostly because of how Facebook's Android-style app is broken more than mine was, Facebook answers one of my Intents badly, a problem many people have had). This particular app has no ads yet, but I wonder who does ads with Kindle Fires. I don't see anything on Google-owned Admob. I don't have an Inmobi account yet, but don't see any mention of Kindle Fire on their web site. I wonder which vendor ad-supported Kindle apps will use.

I use a fairly up to date version of the latest Ubuntu, 11.10, as my desktop.

One thing I dislike is when they complicate things that used to be simple. It used to be if I wanted to switch to another workspace, I would move the mouse to the top of the screen and click which of the other workspaces I wanted. Simple.

Now to do that I have to move my mouse to the left side of the screen. Then a bar pops up on the left side of the screen, then I move to the workspace changer and click on it. It moves to workspace switcher mode. Then I move the mouse across the screen to the workspace I want and click. It complicates something that had been simple. In fact it's changed my behavior in a way I did not want it to - I used to run Firefox and Eclipse in separate workspaces, but as workspace switching is more of a hassle, I now have both open in one workspace.

Aside from things like that, Canonical decided it wanted to do things its own way and has been moving along with a Gnome fork. Which might be OK if it had enough resources. But it does not. for example, here is a bug that I encountered. Orange windows pop up all over your workspace while you're trying to work. It can be quite annoying, as the users comments suggest. It was reported over three weeks ago but a fix has not been released yet. Unity does not have a wide base of developers supporting it like Gnome or KDE do, almost all of the developers doing this type of work are working for Canonical.

I met someone months ago who liked using Google Voice Search on his smartphone. He said the best thing about it was that he didn't have to use the small screen keyboard on his phone. I wouldn't underestimate this as a motive for usage, if it's faster and easier to do it this way, people will use it. My tablet had come with it preinstalled, with a microphone button on the top left, but I never bothered with it until I met him, after I did I tried it out and it worked well. I myself don't use it regularly, if I'm showing the tablet to someone I might show them it can do that, but I haven't used it much otherwise.

I don't see this as an Android killer at all. Today you can download various Android apps, including Google Voice, that can perform tasks by voice activation and recognition. Even if Siri is superior to them, and maybe it is currently, they're good enough in the time being for most people.

I've been developing for the Android Market since May. There are some things to consider. One is some companies don't expect immediate success - lots of banks and such which may have been slow to get a website, have decided to get on smartphones and tablets now. The return for this might take years to come, but they have plenty of money. Why not do it now? They have the money and forecasts show they'll need it eventually, to stay competitive. Sometimes it is existing software. For Android, the Adobe PDF reader was really junky for the past few months. They just released an update, and now the app is much, much better. So they also are protecting their brand.

My capital costs, other than my labor time, are approaching $0.00. Well actually approaching $25.00 as that's what a lifetime Android Market account cost me. I have Admob ads in most of my apps, and average 5 cents a click. So after 500 clicks, I'm in the black. I can go on vacation for two weeks, and come back and see how much I have earned in the interim on Ad clicks. If I wanted to, I could sell apps, or do in-app sales and the like, and maybe I'll try that in the future.

This is something I enjoy doing. I do everything - I look over the entire market, I think up what to do, I write the code, I do the layout, I do the artwork (or get free for commercial ones from findicons.com, iconfinder.com etc.), I decide which user-requested features to implement and which to ignore. I decide whether to work on a new project or improve my existing projects. And then I get the money. Another thing is with work, in this young market, my check is increasing every month. Some of it is my improved products and some of it is people getting new Android devices for the first time.

Some of the things our community knows are relevant here I think. Release early, release often! Are there any Android apps which could load and search Microsoft Access databases on the phone, even if it had no network connection? There wasn't back in June. There still is not one as far as I know other than mine - Panacea Database. I didn't even have to do the Access-specific work, there was a LGPL license library out there I used called Jackcess. My first release took four days - all it did was load the database and iterate through the table rows. You couldn't even iterate backwards, and users said it then looked like junk on smaller phones. But in terms of competition, only one app came close, and for some things (free for an unlimited time, able to handle Access without needing to install a desktop app), it had no competition. Now, 1500 active users later, I have made a lot of improvements, many suggested by users. Which is another thing known by our community - listen to the users, and with a little bit of discrimination, let them have a large hand in determining the roadmap.

Panacea Database was really just an experiment to see if I could successfully port a popular open source Java library to Android. The experiment was an all-around success: I ported it, I sent patches back to the library which helped improve its Access 2010 usage (actually the lead developer took my patch and improved it even more), and lots of users are happy they can do what they want on their Android phones and tablets, and I'm making money on ads. And - I'm helping, in a very small way, an open source Linux platform be more useful. It's a small effort, but combined with a lot of other people like me, it has an effect. The users make out, the library makes out, Admob makes out, Google makes out, the manufacturers make out, the carriers make out, and I make out.

So the map seems pretty open to me. As the Cathedral and Bazaar says, whether its open source or not, scratch your own itch. Think what you'd like to see that is not on Android - or not on it in the way you want. Will people be able to find your app? There's 2 or 3 popular file managers, and those apps are easily findable by searching for file explorer or file manager or whatever. Will your app be as easily findable? Will people be looking for "file manager" or whatever yours does? I use file manager as an example as it's something to avoid - there are 3 popular file managers with many features, and you'd really need to bring something new to things to compete with that. Yours would need to be as good or better than the best of those 3 to make a dent in market share. But plenty of things people want are not out there yet. Read the message boards and forums of people complaining what they can't do on Android. If you can program, you can fill that niche.

Another thing of release early, release often - I try for my first version to be put out as fast as possible, with as few features as possible - but that people will still be happy. So people won't feel they wasted their time downloading it. Maybe I'd get a 3 or 4 star rating in the market. "Good, but should have feature X and Y as well". So enough people want features X or Y, or if it sounds like a good idea regardless, implement it. The "waterfall" development method of going off into a cave and developing for a year or two and coming back is probably not a good idea. Better to put it out (once it is somewhat useful though) and see if it takes off or drops with a thud. It's a delicate balance of deciding when to release - you don't want to do it too early, but you don't want to spend months of hard work and then learn no one cares. It's generally agreed developers tend toward the latter and err on too late rather than too early. I generally aim to spend no more than a month working on an app before releasing the first version. The idea would have to be really spectacular for me to spend more time.

People have been quoting Steve Jobs lately, and one thing he basically said is he didn't think about making money but about releasing great products that people wanted. He figured if you focused on that, the money would follow, and in his case he was right. For Panacea Database, the nice comments, occasional five star ratings and thank you emails are in many ways a payment for the work on that app, along with the ability to be giving back patches to the Java library I built around, and writing useful apps for an open source platform, Android, which I enjoy using. I also enjoy the craftsmanship of doing a job completely by myself. The money from Admob is just icing on the cake.