SourceForge Donation System for Projects

comforteagle writes "O'Reilly Developer News is reporting that SourceForge has begun a donations program for hosted projects in addition to the program which was for supporting the site. Apparently project admins have to opt-in to have the program setup for them, but it sounds like a pretty good idea. There's a 5% transaction fee, but that doesn't sound totally unreasonable. Perhaps a limit would be a good idea though." Sourceforge and Slashdot are both owned by VA Software Corp.

Comments

Transaction fee

[nacturation]

There's a 5% transaction fee, but that doesn't sound totally unreasonable.

This is even less than what 2checkout charges. Not a bad deal at all and SourceForge gets a bit left over after processing fees.

Re:Transaction fee

[gnu-generation-one]

"There's a 5% transaction fee, but that doesn't sound totally unreasonable... not bad at all"

Minimum transaction fee: $1. So the percentage varies from 5% to 20% depending on how much you spend.

Re:Transaction fee

[nahdude812]

I was excited to see only a 5% fee also. However, this is a little inaccurate. Since SourceForge takes the donations over PayPal, PayPal also sticks in its surcharges. So it's 5% less good (for the developer) than just using PayPal to accept donations. I'm not sure what the benefit is here. My project already accepts donations through PayPal, and I'd been watching out for a new means as not everyone who has wanted to donate could or wanted to use PayPal.

PayPal vs SourceForge - Breakdown

[Motherfucking Shit]

Assuming it's really only a 5% transaction fee (the linked site states: "A few other tidbits of information about this new donation system: SF.NET is taking a 5% piece of the transaction fee," which seems to suggest that the transaction fee is larger than 5%), here is the breakdown between PayPal and SourceForge.

PayPal charges max 2.9%, plus $0.30.

If you want to donate $1.00 to your favorite Free Software project, the fee is 5 cents through SourceForge and 33 cents through PayPal.

If you want to donate $5.00, the fee is 25 cents through SourceForge and 54 cents through PayPal.

If you want to donate $10.00, the fee is 50 cents through SourceForge and 59 cents through PayPal.

If you want to donate $15, the fee is 75 cents through SourceForge and 74 cents through PayPal.

If you want to donate $20.00, the fee is $1 through SourceForge and 88 cents through PayPal.

PayPal is therefore a better solution for donations >= $15.

Re:PayPal vs SourceForge - Breakdown

[rizawbone]

(the linked site states: "A few other tidbits of information about this new donation system: SF.NET is taking a 5% piece of the transaction fee," which seems to suggest that the transaction fee is larger than 5%)

You can take 5% of anything. It doesn't suggest a larger percentage at all.

Re:PayPal vs SourceForge - Breakdown

[Anonymous Coward]

Pay-Pal; an ex-managers story/observations: (copied from paypalsucks forums)

I was a "middle management type" with Pay-Pal until leaving recently- partally due to my disgust over their internal security policies which have led to the mountain of complaints seen on this and other similar boards. There aren't many PP whistleblowers; during your "exit interview" a soon-to-be-former manager is warned, intimidated and threatened against doing the very thing I'm doing right now. But since I left to start my own business, there's not a thing they can do to me.

Pay-Pal DID start as an honest, legitimate company with an innovative service concept. However, in my opinion, this concept can never actually WORK in the real world because there are legions of scammers all over the globe with reams of stolen credit card info and identifications just WAITING to swoop down on any new "payment service" like this that comes along. Credit-card transactions where the "card is not present" and thus personally examined by a clerk account for the overwhelming majority of fraud transactions. Comparitavely, there's very LITTLE credit card fraud at Wal-Mart, because the cashier actually sees both you and the card- and can ask for supporting identification at the point of sale. Unfortunatly, the high-risk, "card not present" transactions are the ONLY kind of transaction a company like PP can do, and boy- did the con artists find them in a hurry! The basic con was (and is) to use stolen identification information to open new PP accounts, funnel money into them with stolen credit card numbers, then transfer the money OUT of the account before PP gets the charge-back and can freeze it. Unfortunately, despite PP's claims of having a "tough anti-fraud program", these people are mostly impossible to catch, because when opening a new PP account, they DO have all the proper-appearing ID information (which was stolen or conned out of unsuspecting individuals, most of whom have never HEARD of Pay-Pal). When fraud is uncovered and the account is checked out, the perp is almost never caught, since it was almost always opened under a stolen identity, and he's long abandoned the mail-drop.

Yes, the application process COULD be made more stringent, but it is felt (probably correctly) that a brand-new customer would certainly balk at doing things like sending in notorized copies of their driver's licence and so forth. So an "alternate strategy" for offsetting the charge-back losses slowly evolved at PP. It's the perfect scheme really; since PP can't usually catch the scammers and dosen't want to loose customer base by making things more stringent to start with- they decided to simply re-coup their chargebacks from the pockets (and accounts) of good, solid people under the easily-defensible and impossible-to-criticize guize of "Fraud Prevention and Enforcement".. Simply put, if you're a seller and somebody pays you with a stolen credit card, you're targeted by PP security and might very well have your account siezed, "investigated", closed- and the money retained by PP. (Yes... they simply "add" it to their revenues and spend it like any other income. You basically gave them permission to do this under the "terms and conditions" you originally agreed to. No, I KNOW you didn't really read it, but I bet you will the next time!). Even if the person paying you has NOT used a stolen credit card, he could have been been flagged by PP as "somebody to keep an eye on" for any one of numerous reasons. If he does business with YOU, especially multiple times- you're frozen. OCCASIONALLY some lucky soul will complain about the siezure, and when the case is "investigated" by PP he is "cleared" and the money unfrozen. This good fortune has nothing to do with an actual "investigation" (there aren't any, really). Pay-Pal WILL unfreeze a small percentage of the accounts (as a future defense against a potential class action), so you MAY benefit from a simple luck of the draw. See, if it ever comes down to a massive class-action lawsuit, or even testimo

Re:Could get messy

[mcpkaaos]

Not which projet, which members of each project.

OK, I'm an idiot

[Motherfucking Shit]

Upon further investigation, I managed to locate this:

http://sourceforge.net/tos/donations.php

It seems that SourceForge is actually using PayPal to handle the donations. They're just taking 5% of PayPal's fee, at least that's how I read it, so they must have worked a deal with PayPal.

Some better information in the story would have been nice. As it was, I clicked the link to OreillyNet, which had a link to SourceForge's forums, where I had to read an entire post and then locate a link to SourceForge's Terms of Use, which then directed me to yet another page describing the Donations Terms of Use.

A lot of digging to find info about this new feature. You'd think, being a VA entity, that Slashdot would have spiced the story up with a few more relevant links!

Re:OK, I'm an idiot

[zurab]

And yet you haven't found the correct part. The site documentation about donations explains how much will be deducted from each transaction:

PayPal deducts from each transaction a service fee in accordance with their policies; this fee may vary depending on currency conversion and other factors. SourceForge.net also assesses a separate service fee. As of 2003-12-01, the SourceForge.net fee is 5% of the donation, with a $1 minimum.

So, SF fee is separate from PayPal's fee and is charged on top of that; and has a minimum of $1. With bunch of small donations $5 to $10 from each contributor, the SF fee alone will be in the whopping 10%-20% range.

Re:OK, I'm an idiot

[gnu-generation-one]

"So, SF fee is separate from PayPal's fee and is charged on top of that; and has a minimum of $1. With bunch of small donations $5 to $10 from each contributor, the SF fee alone will be in the whopping 10%-20% range."

Perhaps we should point out that the cheapest way to receive donations is still to publish an address, work address, or P.O. box number. (If you think addresses should be private, have a look at your WHOIS listing sometime)

You can then mail cash as a donation, and it'll cost a few tens of cents for postage, and it works worldwide. You can buy money in the recipient's currency at your post office, or if you're in the same country, write a cheque.

Just don't tell the postman you're mailing cash.

If you need to transfer a large amount, you can publish a bank account number, and people can transfer money directly to that account. The cost of that would be about $10, but for large amounts of money, you really want to trust a bank, instead of someone [PayPal] which looks like a bank, acts like a bank, but has a history of cheating, a ridiculous ToS/privacy policy, and absolutely no regulatory oversight.

Re:Sounds like...

[Anonymous Coward]

Open is not a synonym for free, a program can be open source even if you can't use it at all without paying for a license!!!

Re:"non-profits that support Open Source"

[AsparagusChallenge]

From admin->donate, on the project page:

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
Apache Foundation
Open Source Initiative (OSI)
Gnome Foundation
KDE.ORG
The Python Software Foundation
SourceForge.net

And one can set a percentage between 5% and 100%

Re:Paypal.com may be a bad idea

[gnu-generation-one]

"If any of this is true, I would hate to see SourceForge caught in the middle of something that could hurt them or its users."

SourceForge mention that their system is a good way to donate money to organisations such as the EFF.

It's worth noting however, that both the Free Software Foundation, and the Electronic Frontiers Foundation accept credit cards directly, without any sort of intermediary.

As for Debian, there's the Software in the Public Interest site, which is setup to handle donations to Debian, or to other Free Software projects.

If you have more time than money, consider the Help Wanted pages at SourceForge and Savannah (currently unavailable)

paypal fee 32 times higher than e-gold!

[Anonymous Coward]

paypal fee is 30 cents + 2.9%??

for a dollar donation that sucks!!!

e-gold charges 1% capped at 50cents.
so a dollar donation is a penny fee.

32X more fees for 1 dollar donation when using
paypal instead of e-gold!

mozilla foundation accepts e-gold.

SourceSupport.org does this better

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been working on a project that is listed over at Source Support where they take it one step futher, The don't give the money to the developers until the project is completed.

Here is a clip from their FAQ...

1. What is SourceSupport.org?
SourceSupport.org provides a system to pay programmers, artists, content creators and just about anyone that can provide a solution to challenges submitted by users. For example, let's say that there is a large group of people out there that want 'Program X' ported over to 'Operating System Y'. First, someone submits the challenge on SourceSupport.org. Others who see the challenge and are willing to donate for the cause can submit any amount they want with the hope that the added funds will persuade someone to come along and take on the challenge. Hopefully the challenge will be met and it becomes a win-win situation for both the donors and the person/team that completed the challenge. The donors get 'Program X' running on 'Operating System Y' and those who completed the challenge get paid. Finally a good way for a Open Source programmer make some cash for their efforts.