So as far as I know no stations running LibreTime have expressed interest in paying for support or development. This could be due to a number of reasons. One possibility is the type of stations using LibreTime are happy with it as-is and don’t have any money in their budget to support a project they can download for free. Or perhaps we haven’t been proactive in soliciting donations from users of LibreTime and they would be willing to use money to support the project if they were asked more frequently.
The real question I think is even if we were able to get money from a number of stations is whether this would be a sufficient amount of money to hire developers full-time. I suspect that it would be a rather small amount in the grand scheme of things and nowhere near the amount required to sustain payroll.
I suspect that the users of LibreTime would be able to help more if they were to submit testimonials about how LibreTime helps them serve their mission and helped us connect with potential non-profit funders that support development of independent media projects, like those who originally funded the development of Airtime.
One department we are lacking in with comparison to the originators of Airtime is in terms of marketing, promotion and branding. Plus as an organization we are primarily focused on the code which I think is fine and appropriate. We just need to remember what happened to Airtime and how the free & open-source version was more or less abandoned because development was funded almost exclusively by a single entity.
I think probably the most useful thing that we could do rather than trying to make money from hosting would be to reach out to stations that we know are using LibreTime and compile a contact list so that we can get in touch with them regarding new versions, donating to the project in terms of code, word of mouth or promotions. Just searching the web for LibreTime shows that there are a number of unique stations not listed anywhere on this forum that have picked up the software and are using it. Since we are free software we don’t want to require people to sign-up for a mailing list or even register that they are using the software. We have no telemetry which isn’t something I want to change. I am happy with how LibreTime respects the freedom of the users but it would also be useful to be able to reach out to the users who wanted to receive updates from us regarding development, funding and other things. I’m still not sure the best way to organize this data but that is my thoughts on the matter.