On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 12:15 PM, Tristan Woudenberg - Prism Open
Source <
tristan@...> wrote:
> On Wed, November 12, 2008 21:00, Paul Lesniewski wrote:
>> On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 9:09 AM, Daniel Watts <
d@...> wrote:
>
>> We don't have a lot of energy going into this lately. I'd like to see that change,
>> but real life/paid work seems to get in the way for many of us. My feeling
>> over the last year is that one way to reinvigorate SM development would be to
>> finally (we've talked about it for years) start accepting donations (specific
>> bounties will probably help too, although I'd hesitate to put a price tag on the
>> huge amount of work of getting the template system finished). Alternatively,
>> anyone not already on the SM team who feels motivated to dive into some of
>> this should contact the team and propose to help!
>
> If you guys would start accepting donations we would like to be the first to
> donate! We have been supporting and pushing SquirrelMail to our users for
> years now and I think the implementation of templates and a 1.6 version would
> really help getting SquirrelMail forward. Unfortunately we still don't have the
> recourses/knowledge available to donate in code right now. But if the SM team
> needs people to test we'd like to help in any way possible.
We certainly appreciate your enthusiasm. If you want to test and
provide feedback, PLEASE DO! The best way to do that is download
1.5.2SVN snapshots every so often and tell us what is and is not
working.
Technically, we have already been accepting donations for quite some
time through SourceForge. The catch (which we should fix) is that
donations have to be directed at a single person at a time. If you
visit here:
http://sourceforge.net/project/memberlist.php?group_id=311You can see that most all of the main SM developers accept personal
donations. I also have been placing prominent donation information in
the README file of all of my plugin releases, of which I make at least
a couple a month. It has been extremely disappointing to see that,
thousands of plugin downloads later, not a single penny has been
donated; not a single inquiry has come forth from that.
It's not that we don't do this for our own satisfaction, because
otherwise this project and many like it would have been long dead.
Rather, it's that sometimes it does feel a bit like work when the
tasks involved are more about what has to be done as opposed to what
we'd rather do... or when thankless users make demands of us on the
mailing lists, etc. I make no judgments of other OSS developers, but
it sometimes perplexes me that projects like Gallery have been (as far
as I know) receiving plenty of donations, but a much more
system-critical software package like SquirrelMail has only received a
few emails over the years from nice people saying "yeah, sure, I'd
donate!"
At this point, it seems clear to me that you have to hit people in the
face with it. I'd rather not make it about pandering and begging
people to support the project (because I much prefer the idea that we
are doing this for reasons other than money, but that appreciative
users are willing to take the effort to figure out how to donate), but
it seems that that is what is expected. Or maybe people don't read
README files and a simple Donation link on the web page, even if it
just points to the page I linked above, would be enough to change the
situation. Either way, I do think we'll start to inch toward having a
project donation system online in the coming months. In the meantime,
there are avenues to expressing your appreciation available if you
look for them.
Cheers,
Paul
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