[eluser]maadmac[/eluser]
[quote author="John Fuller" date="1203747213"]Absolutely I am willing to buy scripts. I have purchased many ExpressionEngine licenses, Add-ons from Ellislab and 3rd party add-ons (mostly from Solspace.)[/quote]
Ditto Mr Fuller. We've purchased at least a dozen commercial EE licenses and several Solspace plugins. Our firm is happy to pay for valuable work--apps, web services, whatever. If your work delivers more value than it costs to buy, you'll always have a market.
Me personally, I also make it a habit to donate to open source initiatives that make my life easier (Firebug, CocoaMySQL, jQuery), but I may be an outlier. I don't think there's any amount of money I could pay that could possibly convey my gratitude to the Firebug team -- that one single plugin has transformed web development.