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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.
I'd hate to see what would happen the moment divvying the donations up among project members goes awry. How do you decide whose contribution deserves what portion? I'm not sure money is the right thing to toss into the OSS mix.
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
What do i need sf for? just givem my paypal email and end of story.
I find it an interesting coincidence that a lot of small businesses pay about 5% when you make purchases with a credit card.
I'm not saying it is fair or unfair or even insensitive, but interesting.
Heck, a lot of charities will skim 60% off the top of donations just for canvasing etc. In this respect 5% sound quite reasonable.
Promote Sensitivity on Slashdot, make me your friend.
PayPal is therefore a better solution for donations >= $15.
But you forget one thing.
The fee will be used to provide much needed bandwidth and hosting space.
Paypal does not contribute back.
Even if I would like to redirect 100% to an organization, say, a couple months, still requires a valid paypal account's email address.
Not that I think I could bring donations, but just to experiment a while it would be useful to have a chance to re-donate without the mess of creating a paypal account (I code just for fun, I may change my mind later but right now that's what I would like to do: redirect a 100% just to see what happens).
I am not sure how many of you are aware of numerous reports of paypal.com being a somewhat questionable company. While I have not had them cause me any trouble personally, I thought it worth mentioning. It seems some people have had paypal.com hold up in excess of $5000.00, to either get it back in a year, or not at all. If you read the forums, you get a real good idea about how horrible they really are, with ex-employees telling some very interesting stories. 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.
to see a project allow those who donate to vote on what the money went towards.
I would have to vote for Perl/Python modules for GNU cash.
"Project admins can decide if they want to give a portion of their proceeds to non-profits that support Open Source, such as the Open Source Initiative, Python, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Gnome Foundation, etc."
Does anyone has a complete list? Does it include KDE e.V. too?
Often the open-source stuff is better supported, more stable and has better features than the commercial software that it replaced. Two examples of this are VNC and Liberum (both SourceForge hosted projects).
VNC works much better for us than other commercial software and Liberum has completely replaced all of other helpdesk software due to its easy web interface and no need for a client install. A support person can clear a call while sitting on the desk of the person whose box they have just fixed.
If we gave even a percentage of the money that we saved due to these two products, it would run in the thousands of pounds.
This way they can continue to host these open source projects.
And only open source projects hosted on sourceforge, which is not good in my oppinion.
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 :)
You should call it Serviceware, since you're essentially supporting the concept of software development as a service instead of a product. Some companies (plug, plug) already release software like that.