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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.
Will people pay for my open source sit on my ass project?
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
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.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
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.
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.
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.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
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).
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!
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
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.
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!!!
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
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.
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?
"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.
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.
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.
C U!
Mario Valente