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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.
Don't you think mostly the largest and most popular projects get the donations ? And when they do, perhaps some of the projects can use the money to expand further.
I don't agree on the shareware thing, it's not like you have to pay.
I see more and more OSS projects accepting donations, and my guess is that there will be more to come. The good thing is that you can support the ones YOU feel like need supporting! So the couple of projects you think of, fine, support them, I'm sure they could use your money.
Sounds more like shareware
:)
I don't think I would mind having non-encumbered, free redistribution, free modification, full source available shareware. If it can still be called that way
A couple.
For all the rest life will simply go on. These couple will have better opportunities. No loss.
However, if you give money through SourceForge the money is going back into them instead of a third party. This way they can continue to host these open source projects.
Don't you think that's up to the project manager to decide ?
I see your point, and it would mean that as a contributor to a project you trust the project manager with handling the money. Remember, each project must sign up for this opportunity themselves, they are not automatically a part of it.
Umm..I can see the next step. You can opt-in for some sort of subscription through with you can get "support" through email by code maintainers.
Really?
:)
I for one consider this an excellent initiative from SourceForge.
Project developers get a standardized solution for monetary support
and SourceForge gets money to support their servers and are able to provide better service.
Besides, in projects where the division of money
would prove difficult the decision would be easy to just not join the program.
Also, we're talking pennies here. Open source developers and their users are cheap SOBs
The beauty of this system (as well as it's potential downfall) is the possibility of the projects to redirect the money. Where projects use other projects as the basis of their work (say a cdrecord front-end), the front-end is more likely to attract end-user cash then the back-end but should recognise the appropriatness of redistributing some of their donations to the back-end. If this works well you would see the cash going into all the systems valued by the end user. If it goes badly you will see warefare within projects as well as between projects who share code. So who thinks the people within each project in charge of the money distribution will be able to do the right thing? I don't though I really wish they could!
I would rather see donations going to a collection of groups like SPI, FSF, UserLinux, Mandrake, Lindows who can act as a front end to collect money and channel it out to places where they think it's going to get the best value for the donators (including giving it to themselves to keep working). This of course would not prevent warfare, but at least it would provide a handful of central decision making bodies to examine and evaluate so the community could bring to potential donators attention the history of how the bodies have acted and who therfore are the best choices depending on what you aim to promote. It is for this reason I see Mandrake and even Lindows as potential donation targets (and you could argue for most commercial linux offerings) as they both develop internally and by bringing in outside interests, Lindows going for the big publicity grabbing things (FrontPage replacement, XBoxLinux and of course the eponymous distro), Mandrake just looking to put together a good set of distros. Of course there is no means to make a donation to a US company (not sure around the world how this works) as Michael Moore delighted in by bringing around fat cheques to "give" to companies.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
While its nice that they always _mention_ there's a corporate slant in giving space to Sourceforge stories, it's still a bit disturbing that a whole community is serving the interests of the likes of VA - not to mention IBM, Novell, and whatever big company becomes Linux/GNU/Open Source vendors.
Nah, I don't really know if there's a solution. While the compromise seems to be working okay (at least in the server market), for how long will be people willing to work for free for IBM?
How much is hacker reputation really worth?
It hasn't been a problem for us at Xaraya with the donations, as we reinvest the donations that we receive back into marketing, pr, etc. We report back the balance of the donations about once a month to the other committers on the project and discuss and have specific goals for the money earmarked. If you expect to get rich from the donations coming in from a project, remember that there are other much more worthy charities that folks will donat to. Donations are generally $20 to $50 scale and are just nice ways of saying thanks, when someone doesn't have the knowledge to reinvest in the project via code / bug reports / docs.
If this donation system actually begins to improve the service quality of SourceForge, while removing ALL banner ads, I see it as a good thing, except, that's not going to be the case here.
Let's also not forget about SourceForge drifting away from the community, being non-Free itself (with the code being unavailable), crippling common development and project management tools, and hijacking projects for personal gain.
When I checked around a couple of years ago, Paypal had the lowest transaction fee of any of the places that mere mortals can use for processing credit cards.
I've accepted a hundred or so payments thru PayPal; not one person I've dealt with had a bad experience and told me about it. A couple of people emailed me and said they did not have PayPal accounts and weren't going to get them because they "heard that PayPal is evil incarnate...". So they mailed me a check.
If you ask me, these people are being silly. They just sent a person they do not know (me), who is in another state or country, their checking account number. Thats like having unprotected sex. Oops I forgot this is slashdot and some of you may be unfamiliar with what that is - think of it as taking on a battle cruiser with your shields down.
There is nothing wrong with being a little careful with online payment systems. For example, I've tied my PayPal account to a throwaway checking account and credit card, not my main account and card. So if something does go wrong I can still make the mortgage payment at the end of the month while I get the snafu cleared up (no snafus yet). And when I get deposits into my PayPal account I immediately withdraw them into the checking account. It costs nothing to request withdrawal of funds.
C U!
Mario Valente
Well, I hope that Sourceforge can handle the big burst of new requests for projects to be setup. They're gonna be busy for a while separating the rare wheat from all that chaff that's gonna hit them.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist