Java Persistent Objects (JPOX) is an Open Source development. It is written by volunteers in their spare time. They receive no payment for their work (both providing the software, and for their time answering your questions on the forum), and as a user you are benefiting from this effort. The JPOX project additionally incurs some costs in providing this software, in terms of hosting, and domain registration.

You can help the project in many ways. Here are some examples

• Answer questions on the Forum. New users of JDO/JPA and JPOX need to learn somewhere just like you did when you first used JPOX. You could monitor the forum when you have free time and attempt to answer people's questions. People will appreciate it even if you don't know all of the answers.
• Debug problems in the code before reporting them on the Forum. You can isolate the issue to a particular area of code even if you don't know the solution, and post your findings on the Forum for one of the developers to pick up and progress further. Better still contribute patches so it saves our time in working out where the problem lies. These will be much more valuable to us. Contribute any patches in patch format ("diff -u"). Please see the JPOX code format convention
• Volunteer to be a developer of JPOX. You can do this by going to the "Volunteers" section of our Forum and post the developer agreement (stored in one of the threads in that Forum). Thereafter you can push JPOX further yourself when you have time. Be aware though that once you have gained commit rights, inactivity for a period of time (e.g 3 months) will mean that you will lose these rights. You could volunteer to work on a particular part of JPOX (e.g RDBMS) or all of it, up to you.
• Donate to the project. This will help to fund the time of one of the main developers and will mean that JPOX functionality will be expanded faster due to your help.
• Contribute documentation or worked examples that can be included in the online documentation. If you think there is something missing from our documents then you can write it and contribute it and others will benefit from your work just like you have benefited from our JPOX product. You can contribute these via either the Forum or by raising an issue in JIRA

We hope that the above has given you some idea how your time can be used to benefit the common goal of having a quality Java persistence solution free for all to use.