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I'm a developer on the Synergy+ project, and today we received our first donation! Now, I did write at one point that we would spend the money on advertising, in order to find new developers - but I'm not really sure how to go about this, or if it's the best way to spend the donations. We would spend it on hosting, only we use only canned hosting for our site which is free. Maybe in future we'll have some hosted services, but I don't know if it'll ever be necessary.
Does anyone have any experience with handling donation money from end-users? I'd like know what other projects have done about this (e.g. Ubuntu). Should we just save it for a rainy day? Also, I'm accepting the PayPal donations to my personal account, which I'm a little wary about, since the project doesn't belong to me - it has a collective ownership really. Is it normal to have a single person who is the treasurer?
Thanks for your comments! In response, I have changed our statement about how donations will be spent.
"We are currently establishing a funds reserve, so that we can hire professional open-source developers to fix the most critical bugs, and move the project forward. We promise to spend your donations very carefully, and discuss how the funds should be spent between all of our key project members. Not only will your donation help our project to move forward, it will also boost moral and community spirit - because it shows that what we're doing really matters! Thank you."
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Open source development could be looked at as a form of volunteering. Many developers have donated their time to either maintain or contribute to open source projects. These developers may not care about being compensated for their time—they are just happy for the experience, challenge or may just like helping others.
Ultimately, open source sustains itself through contributions from people all over the world, and that's bigger than any one company or location.
That's one of the primary allures of open source technology: rather than having to invest countless hours into building code from the ground up, programmers are able to collaborate and build it together, or at the very least, use someone else's code as a starting point for their project that will then also be released ...
Pizza and Beer?
In all honesty though, I think the open source community respects honesty above all else. If you said you were going to spend the money on something, you should probably follow through.
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If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
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