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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?"
Report bugs, submit patches, create your own software, and helping people troubleshoot problems in forums are ways to contribute if you live in a country that Pay Pal isn't accepting credit cards from. You can also do this in a country that Pay Pal DOES accept credit cards from, if you're broke.
When you get to hell -- tell 'em Itchy sent ya!
Go retro. Send pizza.
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OK, if Paypal will not accept your credit card because you are in East Elbonia, cannot you transfer money from your bank account into your Paypal account?
Yes, it might mean giving Paypal access to a bank account - but if you are an Internet user in one of the banned countries, might it not be worth creating an account solely to tie to Paypal?
Yes, it sucks that Paypal is trying to reduce their exposure to fraud and keep their service cheap. But cannot this be worked around?
www.eFax.com are spammers
If there isn't enough money involved to justify a credit card merchant account for the OSS group, then send them money however you'd normally send money to an individual in a foreign nation.
Yeah, that's hard.
But what the hell does it have to do with Open Source? Or geekery in general?
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
If you aren't in supported country you cannot make a paypal account at all.
For the kind of money that would constitute a significant donation to an open-source project in western civilization, you could train a team of smart teenagers in a third world country into programmers and food, clothe and house them as they create their own damn open source projects. Hell, as Squeak proves, children can be programmers too! High potential children in third world countries are a great area of untapped programmer potential that can only be tapped by open source projects for serious legal reasons.
*is run over by rotten tomatoes*
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.
You need a CC to sign up and then you can link your bank account. They centre their business on you having a CC that they can query for extended information. Those countries that have CC's but are not supported probably don't supply the information paypal thinks it needs to operate. They basically need access to pre-auth requests... which some places don't provide yet or their CC gateway doesn't support yet.
--- its to bad about the monkey, I kinda liked them
It's the de-facto money manager on internet, yet the're not regulated as a bank, and they just won't accept most of the world as worth considering.
I'm a software developer, and since getting full down into open source, i have a BIG software repository to use. and when i get paid for my work, i'd like to set apart some 5-7% and donate it to those OSS projects i've benefited from... but most of them (especially the smaller ones) only have PayPal. so, i can't contribute monetarily.
of course, i do it the other way, with bug reports and suggestions. sometimes a bit of code. but i know how important is to get money now and then!
sometimes, i just click on a few of their ads; hoping they'll get some click points.
-Kz-
> If you want to support the Open-Source Software
> movement but don't live in a PayPal-accepted
> country, what are your alternatives?"
Pick a developer (preferably not a big-name one) and mail him a check or money order.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Paypal hasn't "banned" any country. They started out as a U.S.-only operation and have been grandually adding other countries to their system. Given the complexities of international financial transfers, it's hardly suprising that they haven't yet covered the entire planet.
If you're a girl, the following steps may not change the world, but they WILL make a lonely, starving open-source coder happy:
1. Locate an open-source coder.
2. Approach said coder's dorm room or apartment in a trenchcoat (naked underneath), with a six-pack in one hand and a bag of Chinese food in the other.
3. When the coder opens the door, announce "I noticed you checked my bug-fix into CVS this afternoon! Let's celebrate!" Lean back so the trenchcoat opens up, and hold up the beer and Chinese food.
4. Be ready to administer CPR if the coder has a heart attack.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
You can't even sign up for a Paypal account without a credit card. This,
incidentally, impacts people in the US too, if we don't have a credit card
or, possibly due to having done a Google search on Paypal first and turned
up a hillion jillion horror stories, are unwilling to give Paypal access to
our full line of credit. I'm in the former category: I'm one of those
curmudgeons who refuses to have a credit card. There are a plethora of
reasons for this: I receive more junk mail from the credit card industry
than all other industries combined, for one thing, and so I'm not willing
to support them. Additionally, I view credit cards as a fundamentally bad
idea, because they make it very convenient and easy to spend money you
obviously cannot afford to spend, because you don't have it. I've seen
entirely too many people get a credit card "for emergencies" and three or
four years later be so deep in debt they will probably never regain their
financial independence. For every person with the personal discipline and
self-control to keep the thing paid off, there are nine people who can't,
and so they ruin their lives. As far as I'm concerned, credit cards
*create* emergencies.
(This is quite similar in principle to the recreational use of addictive
substances; theoretically, you can safely use safe amounts of them at home
on weekends, but in practice you get addicted and ruin your life.)
Then there are the userous interest rates that credit cards charge (rates
that IMO ought not even to be legal) and the desceptive tactics they use.
Just the other day I saw a credit card advertisement touting a 0% fixed APR
for the first twelve billing cycles and a 9.something% APR after that, but
the fine print said that the APRs are not guaranteed, that fixed APRs may
become variable, and so forth, completely nullifying the large, bold-faced
wording. For practical purposes, that's false advertising. I'm not
interested in doing business with any company that pulls that sort of
schenanighan. They can stick their card into a choice bodily orifice:
I don't want one, now or ever.
It does bother me that so many OSS projects use Paypal and/or credit cards
as their primary system for receiving donations. Paypal is IMO a very poor
choice, and credit cards are little better. At minimum, they should accept
personal checks. You can't even buy Firefox on a CD at the Mozilla store
without owning a major credit card.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
If you want to support the Open-Source Software movement but don't live in a PayPal-accepted country, what are your alternatives?
For me as an OSS developer, none. Micropayments were forbidden by law here in Czech Republic several years ago, killing lot of fresh internet companies. Banks would not give away their monopolies easily: every money transaction from abroad would cost me at least 50USD deducted from my account, no matter what the sender pays to his bank for the transaction. So, it is cheaper for me to code for free.
There you are, staring at me again.