Restricted Financial Support for Open-Source?

Anonymous Writer asks: "PayPal has become the standard for making donations to Open-Source projects, and in many cases the only way. Out of the 247 countries and territories represented by top-level domains on the Internet, credit cards are available in 128. However, PayPal only accepts credit cards from 45 of these countries, which excludes 83 from using their service. Nearly two-thirds of the countries on the Internet with valid credit card billing services are currently prevented from making donations using PayPal. Even credit cards issued from those 45 accepted countries with billing addresses not among them are excluded, which affects people working overseas and expatriots. If you want to support the Open-Source Software movement but don't live in a PayPal-accepted country, what are your alternatives?"

Comments

Re:Cannot you transfer money from your bank accoun

[Skorpion]

If you aren't in supported country you cannot make a paypal account at all.

I have this problem, too

[wikinerd]

I have been hitted hard by PayPal's decision not to send cheques to my country, which is an EU member.

I plan to use MoneyBookers instead. I have communicated with their support department for a small problem and my experience was very positive, they seem to care about their customers and they offer very good support.

Another alternative is iKobo which gives you an ATM card to withdraw money from your account.

Re:WHAT HAPPENED TO CYGWIN?

[bedessen]

They sent out a second update recently:

Subject: Update: Outage of gcc.gnu.org / sourceware.org / sources.redhat.com
Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2005 18:49:15 +0000 (GMT)

This is an update on the status of sourceware.org / gcc.gnu.org /
sources.redhat.com. It is being sent as "regular email" in the absence
of working mailing lists.

As previously reported, the system suffered a hard drive failure. In
the process of recovering from this, we discovered out-of-date RAID
firmware which exacerbated the problems of recovery. This resulted in
filesystem damage which made recovery of live data impossible and so we
have been forced to restore completely from backup. Fortunately the
backups are very recent. In particular, the CVS repository was backed
up two hours before the system shutdown.

So, things are progressing but much of the backup is off-site, leading
to some transfer delays. Once the backup is completed, the overseers
and project maintainers will need to do some checking before the system can
return to normal operation. The current rough estimate for bringing most
things back online is tomorrow evening California time, or Monday morning
UTC. There will probably not be another update mail before then.

Again, if there are any questions, e-mail Angela
who is one of the sourceware overseers.

Yours,

The sourceware overseers