Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.