If you can't make money, at least have fun.
There's a saying: "If you can't make money, at least have fun." My open source projects have never earned a profit, but they've been enormous fun.
They've put me in the position to meet a lot of great people and go to interesting places. It's hard to imagine having more fun than I did speaking at Perl Oasis and YAPC::NA this year. If anyone releasing projects in other languages has more fun than this, how do they survive?
But giving away software is only fun when people use it. Otherwise it's just saving public backups or something.
So hearing that DomainSponsor's distributed server architecture uses one of my modules made my weekend. It was an awesome feeling, and it put me in the mood to update five distributions in the past couple days.
And write a blog post, which you're reading. Thanks, by the way.
So if you're using CPAN modules (and can talk about it, of course) let us authors know. Because most of us aren't making money at it, and you'll help us have more fun and release more code despite that.