Totally true.
That's because PayPal takes a fixed fee per donation plus a percentage fee.
So the total percentage of a fee is getting smaller as the donations gets bigger.

The US-based account is setted up. We're currently discussing if we should open up an EU-based account as well, and if yes, how to do that (there are legal questions involved).

Besides that we're investigating the best way to set up an Ovi account so we could publish an app which can be bought by donators basically as donation.
The question there is, from which country Nokia will transfer the money, as we have high fees with international transfers to our US-based account.

Is there an US-based developer who has published at least one paid app to the Ovi store and could comment on that?

Did you investigate into acquiring a non-profit account for flattr http://flattr.com/support/charityaccount ? Is that possible, too much of a hassle, or even more fragmenting the issue?

I'll be cheking out flattr, there are some objections about it so I'll try to be as thorough as possible. We'll also consider pledgie.

The main issue with that is Nokia taking an insane fraction of each payment/purchase. I heard sth like 30%, so it's really just for those who got no other means. Probably even sending traveler's checks in an envelope was a smarter method. BTW recurring donations seem pretty incompatible with purchasing an app to donate.
On a related topic: it would help a lot when you could add a remark to your donation about the time span this donation is meant to get splitted until your next donation will arrive. HiFo could estimate way better how much of the funds they got they may spend per month.

cheers and thank you to all donators
/j

do you also accept bitcoins ?

Can we discuss with ovi about %? In this case, there should be less fee as they know our work.

Does the HF or CC know how much it will cost per month to run the infrastructure? I heard "thousands of dollars per month", but is there not an exact number that is known now?

The cost varies greatly depending on the final infrastructure. For now we are on interim infra. If we stay like this the cost would be a couple of thousand dollars, but with a bit of hard work we can drop that to less than a thousand.

Ok, I've donated $20. But also maybe it's a good idea that you publish some figures. It's hard to believe that this infrastructure should cost several thousand $$$ per month. At the moment we have only a vBulletin system (all other still down). Other sites have these for free.

Are you using shared hosted ressources? Are you using bare metal servers and are you paying per rack space?

Before I donate more I want to have some more details what happens with the dollars.

Thanks!

Martin

Hello,

im just realize maemo is migrating away from nokia, which is a very nice surprise, but also concerning, mantaining an infrastructure like thise requires a lot of work.

Im a sysadmin, been using debian-based OS's last 9 years, i can help for whatever you need.

What im viewing is you are trying to concentrate everything in a big badass server, for the repository i dont think is the best idea, you would like to get as much servers as posible with multiples Providers (cheap ones) with a lot of BW, (for example server4you) gives unlimited traffic, and they are cheap, a server from them for only APT repository would be great. then just do a DNS round robin over repository.maemo.org


Also, have you tried to get donors for mirrors? sourceforge and iWeb.ca are very well know for their support to FOSS community, they have debian mirrrors servers and a lot of other stuff.

Hope we can mantain maemo for a long time.

Thanks for all your efforts.

Regards