Dear Community,
I have to inform all of you that we're approaching a critical date for all of us: Nokia is about to stop funding our infrastructure and board and council are busy to establish a new set of servers to run all the bits we need to continue with our daily maemo-life. First impact is on this very forum, which we need to either move to a new server until end of the year, or as a last resort find some 500 bucks to buy one more month of operation on the old one, until we established the move end of January then. There are other expenses the board is facing right now to ensure a smooth continuation of services like repositories, wiki, whatnot else.

So let me start a
fundraiser call for donations
here, asking you to contribute with a donation to keep this community alive.
To give you an idea what we're talking about: a 1000 bucks per month would for sure not be too much to ensure all the infrastructure and professional maintenance, so a twohundered users willing to donate 5 bucks per month on a regular basis would be needed to keep things rolling - unless we manage to find other (commercial) sponsors as well. Though this might happen eventually, we for sure won't find any such sponsor til the end of this year. If you can donate more than those 5 bucks, be assured it's appreciated.

So get your own x-mas present: help keeping tmo alive.

I guess you'll ask now "sure, where can I donate?" - well, wait a little, HF board is about to establish PayPal and other means for that, and I'll edit this post later today to include the links/data.
here's a PayPal link

many thanks for your support
jOERG (councilor)

[update] We finally got a quote for our current infra (VM on xen-grid, basic system maintenance): 1300EUR+2200EUR/month (+VAT). Of course we're trying to do further consolidation and search for alternatives like volunteers for sysops. Just a sidenote to let you know where we are right now and that we didn't exaggerate to the higher values with that initial ballpark figure of needed amount per month.
Oh, and while i'm already editing this: a big thank you to all donators.

Will there be a mean to donate other than credit card and electronic account like paypal?

I do not have any of those, don't want to have any but want to donate.

I'll forward that to HF board, suggesting they should enable moneytransfer and other alternatives to PayPal.

Many thanks for your contribution
jOERG

You may want to give the money to someone who has a PayPal account and ask him to donate for you.

I'm pretty sure you know someone who has an account.

I don't trust that kind of services (call me paranoid, i don't mind).

I don't see the point of not having an account if it is to use the one of a friend... Would not be very consistent with my belief...


EDIT: Sorry for off topic, i stop now

As much as I appreciate this board and would certainly be willing to donate some money, I also see the quality of the threads going down in a frightingly rapid pace.

Rules that once were normal are no longer applied consistently, use of (proper) english, no politics, name calling. And also it seems we have a deflation of etiquette, where people demand (figurative speech warning here) answers without even being able to do a proper google search. When they receive answers, it's being taken for granted.

For me to donate, would mean I also would want to get rid of annoyances like that. Rather than a service enabled by Nokia and provided by volunteers, the board would now become more of a real community effort that somehow needs to justify the money it spends to keep itself alive.

This is not meant as a rant, by any means, but I would like to hear what other people think about this.

Count me in for small monthly amount, more when I am able to.

We're currently in the process of setting up a proper bank account for the Hildon Foundation.
Then you'll be able to donate directly to the bank account.
In the meantime we'll set up a (private) PayPal account just like for the coding competitions.

anthonie,
sure you have some valid points there, but please stay on topic in this thread, and take the discussion about future to a new thread.
Thanks
jOERG

Jaffa informed me that my first post might sound like we're concerned about tmo only, and plan to ditch some/anything else.
Of course that's not the case, there are like almost 20 service domains and we try to keep (almost) everything alive and as unchanged and free of disruptions as possible. It's just that tmo is the first victim suffering the impact, so next two weeks are first instance about keeping it alive without downtimes. While we deal with all the rest in parallel but expect 'doomsday' some days later for that stuff.
Thanks Jaffa for the hint.
/j