Re: Appreciation / Financial support

[Ramana Kumar]

Are either Flattr or Bitcoin possible good alternatives?

On Mon, Jun 18, 2012 at 8:54 AM, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:

Christ van Willegen <address@hidden> writes:

> On Mon, Jun 18, 2012 at 12:12 AM, Janek Warchoł
> <address@hidden> wrote:
>> On Sun, Jun 17, 2012 at 11:28 PM, Tim McNamara <address@hidden> wrote:
>>> From experience, PayPal is very easy to use to send money to
>>> someone in Europe.
>>> The currency exchange is automatic, although I don't know what the
>>> recipient fees are.
>>
>> According to their website it's between 0 and 4% +0,3$ depending on
>> payment method and country.
>
> Ouch, that's quite steep!
>
> David, since you live in .de, you probably also have a bank account
> there. If you list the IBAN (and other info) somewhere, in .eu bank
> transfers are free of fees...

Only in the Euro zone, and they are not _free_ of fee but just can't
exceed the fees for national transfers.

A recent contributor from France discovered that his bank took €3
according to its conditions.  But it would have done so as well within
France.  Now while I have my doubts that a bank with that sort of
condition for a fundamental operation would be competitive (and so I
consider it somewhat likely that there was some mistake involved), I
think that would not be against EU regulations: you can charge all you
want for a SEPA bank transfer as long as you are gouging your customers
the same in-country.

As a rule, contributors in the Euro zone have found transfer costs zero
or small.  This obviously excludes the UK, and fees for bank transfers
from there are somewhere around the £10 figure or more, namely
prohibitive.  Fees might vary according to bank, but so far people have
found that what Paypal skims off is the lesser evil.

I will not list my bank data publicly but give it out on request.  This
is my private account and I need to be able to track the source of
incoming money.  The account also is not specific to LilyPond but to
myself, so if I quit working on LilyPond on a donation basis, I need to
be able to contact everyone who has contributed so far, and don't want
to continue having this account be the target for LilyPond based
contributions.

A publicly listed account number would require a _dedicated_ account,
one which one can close down when the purpose is no longer in place.
Fees for such a non-personal account, namely a business account, are
considerably higher.

Basically it is the same story all over: if you do things "properly",
everybody working the pipeline feels entitled to a more substantial
share.

--
David Kastrup

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