Gerald Richter wrote:
Geting Embperl with threads (and therefor the worker MPM) is planned for one
of the next releases.

The problem is, that it is a lot of work, which needs to be done in my free
time, so I cannot exactly say when it will be finished.

Some time ago Gary Shea [shea at gtsdesign dot com] try to collect some
money on the Embperl list to to speed up this implementation (in such a case
my company would pay some of the implementation cost, but my company is not
big enought to pay all of it of it on it's own)

How much do you need to do this? Setting a specific target and then sending out a "fundraising appeal newsletter" might help. Set up a PayPal account and make a special "donations" web page on your site so that it's really easy to donate (people do not need to be paypay members in order to use a credit card). Yes, I know PayPal isn't the ideal solution, but they do make it easy to give, which is the important thing. Also, implement some kind of "progress bar" on the site to keep track of how much you've raised in relation to the target.

I'n not just spouting here - I did this recently on my crazyguyonabike website to raise funds for a new server. I couldn't afford a new one, so I sent out a newsletter to the user community to ask for $2000. The email went out in the morning, and we had raised the target by the end of the day. Then people kept on giving, and the final total was over $5000 a few weeks later. I was quite surprised!

I don't know how many people are on your mailing list, Gerald, but I think there were about 600 or so that got the email (hard to say with spam filters etc) and a 150 or so who donated anywhere from $20 to $300. You might need more money for this, I have no idea, but you're also probably dealing with people who use Embperl for business. So you might get larger donations if you play your cards right.

People certainly should be grateful for all the effort you've put into this project over the years, you might be surprised at the response. But you do have to make it easy - do the PayPal page, here's mine for example below. Also, have an obvious link to it from the front page. When the fundraising was active, I put the donation button in a big yellow box with a progress bar. You have to update the progress yourself, but that's a trivial project with a small database table.

http://www.crazyguyonabike.com/help/donate/

Key things, I think, are:

1. Make it clear what you're doing and why people should send money
2. Make it really easy to give
3. Give people a visual indication of progress toward the goal - they seem to 
love that

I ran crazyguyonabike since 2000 and never asked for anything in return. I thought asking for donations was distasteful somehow, and I wanted to keep money out of it. However in this case we needed a new server, so everybody would be benefitting. If a similar drive helped you do more to make Embperl even better, then that benefits everybody here, so I think it's in perfectly good taste. Many open source projects have a "donate" button.

If you'd like any more help with this then let me know.

-Neil

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