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

So......

[flewp]

Will people pay for my open source sit on my ass project?

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

[sammy.lost-angel.com]

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.

Re:PayPal vs SourceForge - Breakdown

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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

support?

[kautilya]

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.

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.

Paypal.com may be a bad idea

[caca]

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.

It would be interesting

[chevelleSS]

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.

Re:Could get messy

[xaraya]

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.