Donations

[dolohow]

Do you guys accept donations?

[JayFoxRox]

I'm not sure. What would the benefit of this be?

(The rest of this post is mostly not directly OpenRW related but just my general thoughts about donations)

I personally accept donations, but I'm often just one of the contributors and I don't (want to) take project related donations (especially OpenRW). It's always hard to decide for teams who should get how much money or what it will be used for (maybe developer meetups?).

I'd feel like stealing if I received money for a project which I only worked on for a couple of days if somebody spend years (like @danhedron ) working on it. However, if @danhedron receives money for it I'd not be motivated to work on it any longer either because I don't feel like working on something for free when somebody else higher up receives money for it.
I also dislike the idea of receiving money upfront because it creates the obligation to work on something which should be a hobby and relaxing.

If you like my work (on either of my projects) feel free to donate to me personally.
However, only donate if you can tell what I contributed and you are certain it's me who you want to donate to (and not the person who took years to lay the groundwork before). In the end it's up to the person donating to make sure their money is going to the right person.

Also FYI: I've made exactly $0 (zero) in cash donations across all my projects so far (I got some free hardware though + I've sold some code for good money before which was created as a hobby).
(Ideally I'd pay rent and new notebooks from donations, but I don't think it will ever happen)

[dakk]

You can use a service like this https://www.bountysource.com/ to split the project in many "bounties"; who make the bounty will receive the assigned amount ;)

Edit: it is also a good trick to gain more visibility and new developers in the project

[JayFoxRox]

via IRC (formatting / wording modified):

I noticed that we still haven't discussed/closed this.
Maybe we should consider allowing donations until a pot is full. The money could be used to:

• buy additional domains,
• pay for a lawyer to verify how we have to spell "GTA3(R)(C) all rights belong to R*"
• maybe we could use some money to buy international releases of GTA for a collection we can share between devs?

Whenever we have too much money we could just donate the rest to EFF, MSF or prevent cancer or something - maybe donate during AGDQ or something in the GTA runs for extra publicity.

There are certainly some good uses for the money which I didn't consider before (as I was applying the "donations to pay devs"-mindset).
I still believe paying developers or bounties is a bad idea though.

@PureTryOut added that we should accept all the donations, use what we need for indeed copies of the games, domain costs, etc, and donate everything we have leftover to either other FOSS projects, or charity

@zuzak mentioned that we should consider https://sfconservancy.org

[danhedron]

We're not currently looking to solicit any form of donations.