Re: micro donations & payments -- GNU Herds base accounts

[Antenore Gatta]

I start from the original post because I'm a bit lost with all the replies.

Taking a look on other projects I see that they receive more money from sponsors then from donations.

To give you an example, at the moment, Apache Software Foundation is receiving 280K USD from different sponsors http://apache.org/foundation/thanks.html, if you take a look on the  Fiscal Year 2005-2006 Annual Report you can see that the total revenue was around 240k, so I can guess that the donations were a small percentage of the total.

With this I don't want to say that donations are not important, but that we should focus our attention more on sponsors.

IMHO to take the full advantage of donations, because they are few, we should provide as much (but not too many) payment systems as possible, in fact there is not a good or bad system, forcing a payment method we will loose all the other potential donors.

So my proposal is to use:

1. PayPal, AlertPay
   
2. SPI donation page
3. Donate via check or bank account money transfer
   
4. Sponsored shirts, hats, cups, ...

Maybe we should also choose an anonymous method like PicoPay (yes another one :-( ) http://www.pico-pay.com/opensourcedonations.html

For the legal issues it depends on where will be the Gnu Herds head offices, we will need to do the statement of income, paying taxes and so on...

In general we need a legal representative, someone that will represent Gnu Herds as a legal entity, in fact it's not possible to open a bank account without an owner, and him/her will be responsible of all the legal and money issues.

If we will belong completely to the FSF we should speak with them on how to proceed.

I hope that I put more gasoline into the fire :-P

On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 9:42 PM, Davi Leal <address@hidden> wrote:

> John Sennesael wrote:
> > It would be interesting if donators could sign up with an account and
> > 'deposit' an undefined amount of money, then receive back credits to
> > distribute among projects/pledges/whatever whenever they want to.
> >
> >
> > The advantage of a system like this would be:
> >
> >   1) You can donate to multiple projects/pledges with only 1 paypal fee.
> >
> >   2) This would allow for micro-donations. People can donate $1 or less
> >      to as many projects as they want. Since normally, a low donation
> >      would be absorbed by paypal fees.

To develop something like that, maybe GNU Herds should use as 'account', to
allow deposit money, an:

 a) PayPal account
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paypal

    PayPal critics:
      http://paypalsucks.com/forums/showth...74&old_block=0
      http://paypalsucks.com/

      "Many people are going through Paypal limitations and problems and
       are having their money held for 180 days. ..."


 b) Google Checkout account
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Checkout

    Bad: Do not allow person to person transfer.


 c) AlertPay account
    http://www.alertpay.com/


 d) Merchant account
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_account

    For example: Real Merchant account: http://paypalsucks.com/faqs.shtml
      Reference from: http://paypalsucks.com/


 e) ClickBank account
    http://???


 f) GNU Herds could create one classic merchant account at USA and
    another at Europe?

 g) GNU Herds could developed its own system?

 ...


Maybe the final result should be a base system with a list of
allowed-supported payment methods, bridges?


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