Absolutely agree Sogarth (and Elbimster I appreciate where you're coming from to make that suggestion). Yes, making any of this a paid endeavor greatly complicates the legal situation (and even if it didn't this feels much more like an open source project, with enthusiasts helping out because they want to, and see the benefit of working together). I'm no pinko commie (
) but with this thing I think everything is kept much more pure (including peoples' motives for getting involved) if we stick to a volunteer effort.
But the idea of donating to Mike (Wideawake) to help pay for the hosting is a great one. For the most part this site has been extremely fast loading (compare that to PDAPhoneHome) and I really appreciate the very minimal advertising placed on the site (eat your heart out PDAPhoneHome). I don't know Mike's costs for running the site, but I really doubt he could be making a profit. For one, he just switched hosts and added FTP hosting, so I'm sure his costs have risen. And if this thing takes off bandwidth and storage are going to keep shooting up.
It's up to Mike if he wants to enforce a donation system, but I for one hope he doesn't. I think it kind of ruins the spirit of a place. Look at xda-dev and what they've been able to accomplish, all with just a voluntary PayPal button on their site. I think that's the best way. There wll always be leachers--but even with pay for access, stuff will get leaked out in the open anyway.
Anyway, keep up all of the good discussion guys. The more we flesh these kinds of issues out now the closer we get to putting this thing into action.