This whole donations crap is really not worth the trouble. I actually regret I brought it up especially after the discussion held on the fundraising@ list.
It is not like log4j every user would donate something. I expect less than one in every 10'000 log4j users per year to make a donation. Assuming donations of 20 USD, it amounts to less than 2'000 US dollars per year of which 30% go to the ASF.
Let see. With the remaining 1'400 dollars, I intend buy out Microsoft in an offensive bid, help the world's poor and give the rest to Mark so he can buy IBM and save the rest of the world.
BTW, the 1 in 10'000 is probably quite an accurate estimate.
More comments below.
At 09:21 AM 7/24/2003 +1000, Oliver Burn wrote:
This is a tough issue, with no obvious answer. I had thought about doing something similar for the Checkstyle project I work on.
As I see it, the major problem if you collect donations, is to determine how the money should be divided up among the people who commit to Log4J. I am assuming that you are not planning to keep all the money for yourself, as this would be unfair to people like Mark, who also contribute a lot of time/effort.
So, assuming you are planning to divide up the money, how would you plan to do this? This has the potential to open up a Pandora's box of issues. Much in the same way there are issues in paying bonuses to programmers in the work environment. It also has the potential to kill off people being willing to contribute to Log4J. Look at the issues that surround JBoss.
I wouldn't write off JBoss just yet. The rumors of its demise are vastly exaggerated imho.
Any long term effort for serious development requires monetary resources. One way to secure those funds is to have a big corporation pay the salary of the developers. Another possibility is to have the developers do for-pay consulting work, a la JBoss.
I don't know fully understand the MySql model.
Personally, with the Checkstyle project I decided that it was far easier to avoid these problems and not collect donations. I work on Checkstyle for personal enjoyment, plus for professional gain through experience gained.
Just my $0.02, Oliver
> It appears that the non-profit status of the ASF does precludes such > links. A non-profit organization is not allowed to act as a front > for a for profit organization. > > Good to know. > > At 04:32 PM 7/23/2003 +0200, Ceki Gülcü wrote: >>Hello, >> >>I would like to set up a donations link on the log4j pages similar to >>the Jave project (http://www.jave.de/). The donations will be >>collected by QOS.ch (my company). Thirty percent (30%) of the >>proceedings will be transferred to the Apache Software Foundation in >>order to pay for our infrastructure, legal expenses and shore up >>reserves. The rest (70%) will be used to cover up the expenses of log4j >>development. >> >>What do you think? Is everyone comfortable with this idea? >> >>Let me add that the amounts involved are not very big. I really do not >>expect donations to exceed $2K per year. >> >>I have not yet asked the ASF board for their approval. I wanted to test >>the waters here first. > > -- > Ceki For log4j documentation consider "The complete log4j manual" > ISBN: 2970036908 http://www.qos.ch/shop/products/clm_t.jsp
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Ceki For log4j documentation consider "The complete log4j manual"
ISBN: 2970036908 http://www.qos.ch/shop/products/clm_t.jsp
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