I did a quick search, and didn't see anything come up about this. But (as ever) I'm thinking ahead to m future needs.

I'm familiar with 'donation-ware' from other platforms: the developer creates something, shares it freely, but leaves his/her paypal button handy, so that if you find the app or widget really useful, you can 'buy a beer' or whatever you think it was worth. As someone who really appreciates freeware, it's something I often do - I'd rather make a donation for good free apps than find myself struggling with a crippled shareware version.

But many of the things around here are co-developed by a number of people. That's part of the 'community' aspect of it. What does one do then?

My assumption is that there's probably a sort of 'community chest' for donations in gratitude for things that have been co-produced. Is there? And if so, where?

Or am I havering again?

I don't think most of the community actually expect/take donations other than hardware...

Ahh ok. My mistake. In other platforms, it's pretty common (or used to be) for developers to have a paypal button on their site for a thank-you donation.

And it still is the case. There's plenty of websites which have "donate" buttons, some with better reasons than others.

That being said, I don't necessarily agree with the principle. "Pay me if you like it" is a crappy argument, and "Pay me because I need it" is even worse.

If a guy produces a good piece of software, it means he's good enough a coder and has enough of a brain to get a job. If he doesn't know how to turn his skills into something profitable, why would the community have to get the bill for that? I feel it really takes away something from the whole "Open" spirit, in a way that either you do something for free, and publicise it as such, or you charge for it, and do it from the start as well.

Anyway, back on topic: There's no such feature in the Maemo community. If people want to donate, they can. Either way, I don't support it.

that is actually a really good idea, we should probably ask the big dogs of this forum to see what they think about this and how to implement that. And who wants to use it they are always welcome and I think this will actually bring lot of other developers who are not actively developing for maemo platform. Making maemo even better that what it is right now.

Yerga, for example, does exactly this: http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p=314055&postcount=4

(I'd hit that donate button, but, alas, I don't have a means of actually getting that money to Paypal...)

I believe it was proposed and there is a Brainstorm or task assigned already... I would look there first.

Edit: Dig upon this >> http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=30908

...and this >> http://maemo.org/community/brainstor...gh_emphasized/

Brainstorm, your vote counts.

It's like a minor league baseball player putting a tip jar in front of his spot on the bench so others can help him make it to the big leagues.

I think if the right user is moved to reward an effort by an open source community member, they'll find a way to give back to the creator/developer whether there's a guitar case, baseball hat, or paypal link sitting on the ground next to them or not.

Things get complicated when you start to throw in financial compensation for something so many do for unselfish reasons.

Next thing ya know we'll be comparing how much flair each of us has.

It seems to me that the way to encourage donations is to make the process as frictionless as possible, which means that the donation must be initiated from the application itself, not from somewhere else such as a website or application manager.

How about a standard library that can be used by developers of open source Maemo applications, so that they can add a menu option to their apps called "Thanks...".

When clicked, it displays a short blurb followed by two options:

• Send a brief message of thanks to the developer
• Make a donation to the developer using PayPal

By having a standard format for this, maybe users would get used to the idea that it's easy to reward the creators of apps that they use and enjoy.

Regards,
Roger

A lot of very good programmers are out of jobs in the current environment.

Mike C