I've always used freeware packages of various types - and I've always felt the urge to participate in the communities that I've been part of - first on BIX back in the late 80s, where I released a (fairly simple) C program to read/respond to BIX messages offline, and later in the perl/Sybase community with sybperl, DBD::Sybase, and now taking over the maintenance of sqsh (http://www.sqsh.org).

This all takes time, but I've always considered this as "paying forward" rather than paying back (I think I first saw that term in a Robert Heinlen novel) - that is "I've received help/source code/ideas in this forum, or from a particular individual - I repay this by helping others as best I can".

Michael