Donation, Funding - organized campain

1

Hallo Everybody,

I just registered myself today, and would like to introduce myself:

my name is Emil Ladar, I’m 32 years old, medical doctor, living in Germany.

I fell in love with BeOS the very first time I got my hand on it and have been following sporadically Haiku-development. As a frequent reader of osnews.com - I came across Vasper’s Blog.
(http://vbeosa.blogspot.com/)

A few days ago, when Zeta once again started making news about its decline, I wrote on Vasper’s Blog and made a simple naive? proposal:

To organize a funding/donation campain and buying the code from Access, later maybe release it under some opensource license.

Vasper shortly after explained why such steps wouldn’t be helpful
(http://vbeosa.blogspot.com/2007_03_01_archive.html)
and proposed an organized donation campain in which he offered to participate.

Doing some small websearch on haiku-funding today I found out, that i.e. Axel Dörfler last year was able to work fulltime and get payed for his work on Haiku.

Now I thought to myself:

Instead of donating once, twice or maybe several times some amounts of money - as I can speak for myself - I am willing and able to pay a monthly amount of up to 50€.

Now - if other people out there would participate and can imagine to donate similar monthly amounts - it should be possible to finance a job for some of the core developers.

I want to see a BeOS-derived OS working and flourishing!

Beeing a geek, but not good enough to write code - this is the best way for me to contribute to Haiku.

Maybe the money can be used for different things - but that’s what comes into my mind first.

So here are me questions:

  1. How do you see my proposal of funding programmers?
  2. Who would like to participate in a similar way?
  3. Is there an existing bank account (or organization) in Germany, that would allow me to comfortably wire the money without additional transaction costs?

Best regards

Emil Ladar

2

Buying the source code from Access would probably cost too much, and the money is better given directly to Haiku where it’ll be better spent.

Haiku is getting closer to finishing.

That is a very generous donation Emil. Not many will be willing to give monthly donations or even yearly. Good for you.

#1 Yes, good idea, but getting people to donate won’t be easy. If 10,000 people gave $50/each over a 1 year period then that would be $500,000 for the year. And if they did the same every year, then Haiku would have lots of money for paying developers.

#2 I don’t believe you’ll find many who’ll commit to this, but if you do, then that would be great.

#3 Below is the link to the donation page. They accept Paypal. Or you can send cheque / money order in US Funds to Haiku.
http://haiku-os.org/community/donating_to_haiku

#4 Here is another idea, Create a Haiku User Group. Hold monthly meetings (1.5 to 2 hours) and charge $5 or $10 / month per member ($60 or $120 per member per year) - have them pay monthly or quarterly so it doesn’t look like much. If you got 20 people in the group, then that is $60 * 20 = $1,200/year (or $120 * 20 = $2,400/year). You could show off new Haiku development or talk about Haiku progress. Or have a Haiku party, etc. The best way to get people to donate is to make them feel a part of Haiku & get them involved. Find a meeting place, Fast food place, bar, College or University.

Create marketing & information, color handouts to give out, etc. Can show progress, what has been done, what is being worked on, etc. Have someone create a Haiku distro & hand that out,

3

Another way could be to start selling some Haiku goodies like T-Shirts and coffee mugs. For instance via CafePress. If I do a monetary contribution I’d love to get a small thank you in the form of something like a T-shirt.

Besides this, with the lovely artwork Haiku goodies might even become hot fashion :wink:

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[quote=0033]Another way could be to start selling some Haiku goodies like T-Shirts and coffee mugs. For instance via CafePress. If I do a monetary contribution I’d love to get a small thank you in the form of something like a T-shirt.

Besides this, with the lovely artwork Haiku goodies might even become hot fashion ;)[/quote]

This is a great Idea and I WANT one.

5

These and other ideas come up again and again every half year. I love them all!
Especially, I’d like a POP3 or IMAP account @user.haiku-os.org for $100 per year. I’d get one.