Very true but I don't think charging money from maemo applications will work for a couple of reasons:

1 - It's up to the individual developer to decide the pricing and what to do with the income (if any), not the larger community. That is if the developer even chooses to put the application into a store in the first place.

2- A million monthly free downloads do not transfer to monthly million paid downloads. Especially when the applications are already available for free in extras (enabled by default) so we would need to close down extras and that would be IMO a move to kill the community.

So IMO turning maemo.org into a application store funded place is not the way to go. Besides why would developers who do applications for the community be the ones paying the bills instead of the users enjoying their work for free. Again IMO if we end up being a community funded place then the whole community needs to chip in. Collecting voluntary donations from the community i.e. every 6 months would be one way to do it. And if/when there is not enough donations to run the place one would know that it's time to close the shop. This way the community ifself would decide if it's needed or not.

Luckily we do not need to make such decisions now and have good time to come up with a plan. (I know some people have different opinions on the decision making time.)