Donations?

[Jo-Philipp Wich]

Hi Rich,

> - Currently, nothing in the LEDE Project "goes wanting" because of
> lack of money. The cost of the current three build servers is being
> handled personally by members of the core team. These servers total
> ~150 Eur per month, plus a small annual domain registration fee.

Correct.

> - Digital Ocean has graciously contributed the remaining
> infrastructure (Wiki, Forum, etc) as part of their open source
> support program.

Correct, the only restriction with DO is that we shall not run compute
tasks (buildbots, bitcoin miners ;) - stuff like that)

> - In the future (how soon - 2 months? six months?), we will likely
> need another two servers (additional ~100 Eur/month) to handle the
> full release. There may be team members who could step up to cover
> those new servers.

Yes, in the short term we can likely cover the cost personally, in the
long run some compensation would likely be appreciated.

> - If the current team is willing to continue to handle the existing
> expense, there is no immediate need to seek outside funding for the
> ~250 Eur/mo (3,000 Eur/year; $3,300/year) expense.

Right, there is no immediate, pressing need but eventually it would be
great to cover at least some of the running expenses from donations.

> - On the other hand, donations of $20 from each of 200 community
> members would be enough to compensate those team members for an
> entire year's operating expense, so it might be worth setting up the
> tracking/transparency mechanism to take outsider's money, either
> through direct contributions or some crowdfunding site.

Absolutely.

> - I looked into one such site - gofundme.com. They take 5.3 % of the
> amount. I think (in the US) we might avoid a separate legal
> structure, since gofundme.com also says that most donations would be
> treated as personal gifts, and thus not taxable. I will ask my
> accountant, and report back.

That would be great if you could find some clarification on that -
personally I would have no issues with using something like gofundme.com
- any opinions from the others here?

> - Finally, I would like to put an excerpt of your note on the site. I
> think it's just as important for people to get credit for their
> financial contributions as their technical contributions. I won't
> mention names in the first draft, but I think it's important for the
> community to know about all the contributions that .

Feel free to quote me :)


Cheers,
Jo