[ILUG] project donations

[Pádraig Brady]

Justin Mason wrote:
> Josh Glover writes:
>> On 28/06/07, Gavin McCullagh <gmccullagh at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> You could join the Linux Foundation.  Donations to projects can be useful
>>> too.  Those may seem a little less capitalist but when you buy something
>>> you don't need/want, that's just a charitable donation really too.
>> Yeah, I'm a big fan of projects with a PayPal donate button. Open
>> Source developers on this list, do you have such buttons?
> 
> What we do in SpamAssassin (and I've seen it elsewhere) is link to
> our developers' Amazon wishlists from the CREDITS file.  It's a little
> bit more barter-ish ;)

I don't think donations using paypal are worthwhile really.
I.E. making money using the shareware model is not sustainable.
Consider the VIM project, which is very widely used and gives
all donations to a charity in Africa. That surely is at the top end
of projects that get donations. But considering its millions of users,
it only gets around €20K/year donations¹

Even Putting adsense on a popular open source project site,
would get you more than that. I've talked to Bram Moolenaar,
who now works in google² about allowing adsense publishers
to donate a % to other adsense IDs (VIM's in this example).
He said it was an interesting idea and is looking into it...

cheers,
Pádraig.

¹ http://iccf-holland.org/jaar2006.pdf
² http://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/google_stars.html