Hi, On Wed, Oct 07, 2020 at 11:20:25AM +0200, Sebastian Fohler wrote: > What about a Patron account. > > https://www.patreon.com/europe > > Cause I already asked multiple times for some other means of contribution as > well. > That would help a great deal, makeing it easier. > I'm supporting multiple Opensource projects already this way. > Would that be an option?
Well, to make things clear, first let me remind that the paypal account is my personal account, which I have added a link to from the main page upon request by several people willing to donate many years ago. This has been helpful in the early days, allowing me buy some hardware to experiment during week-ends (such as the 10G lab), and to significantly improve the code's portability and efficiency on small systems. It used to serve to contribute to the hosting costs as well. Since then the project has considerably evolved, being backed by a company offering a much larger full-time development team. And users are well aware of this because nowadays donations are extremely rare (in the range of tens of dollars a year). But at the same time nowadays I do not need them at all anymore, so I'm perfectly fine with replacing the link with anything else. I've only been keeping it because I know that if I remove it, the question will come back again a few months later. The only thing is that I am *not* going to deal with yet another task that adds more burden, so if someone is willing to set up any account via $whatever company, they will have to handle it and pass me the replacement link. At least the paypal link doesn't cause me any extra work beyond replying "thank you" to donators once in a while. Just be aware that since donations are rare, I'm not at all convinced it will be worth doing anything particular. And at some point a solution will have to be found to spend the eventual money that would land there, so someone will have to handle this, and again it's certainly not me. My personal suggestion would be that those who want to give a few dollars better keep their money that they certainly need more than most developers or contributors do, because due to the project's nature, contributors generaly work in IT at levels at which, based on the high quality of their contributions, they're not expected to be starving at all (or if they do they definitely need to switch jobs as their skills are quite sought)! If anyone is ever willing to spend a large amount, like thousands of dollars, better hire someone to develop some useful desired features, it will be an excellent contribution to the project! Another great option is to contact your favorite distro's package maintainer and propose your donation there, because distro maintainers have been doing this thankless job for many years now and deserve some recognition as well. For anything else, offering time to look into bugs, testing -dev releases, improving the doc, contributing to the wiki etc is extremely valuable and helps all contributors at once. As you see, there are still plenty of options which do not require managing any new account anywhere. Thanks for your support :-) Willy
