Donations

[uncle]

MG is a really nice game and I suggest to create a Paypal account used for donating to support further development of the game. That includes online advertising for the game and - of course - drinks for the hard-working developers

Edit (tomreyn): Renamed topic: 'Paypal donations' -> 'Donations'

[Omega]

While the intentions are good, you overestimate the size of the community and underestimate the costs of ads, etc. Firstly, it's no big secret that even amongst great open source gems, a very small selection of players will ever donate. The original Glest team never even opened such a system despite it being suggested several times. Eventually, they opened a limited Glest store, but that was all. In fact, less than 1% of players (judging from download counts) even make an account on the forums. At the best, you could perhaps pay some or all of the costs of web hosting, but advertising online isn't cheap: expect several hundred dollars on the price tag (especially since there's usually loads of hidden fees, plus online advertising isn't like ads at your local golf course: they're extremely competitive).

[tomreyn]

I'm not exactly opposed to setting one up, though I agree with Omega that chances that soemone will actually donate are usually not very high. I also don't like Paypal because they have a bad history in terms of freezing peoples' money without explanation for months or forever, and for privacy issues. I guess Bitcoin is currently the best option in this regard, but it is also not convenient to use, so if we were to do this then we should probably have both.

The most important question, though, would be what the money would be used for. Here's some ideas:

* Advertising:
Advertising could be an option, though I'm convinced that every good software can achieve widespread exposure (if, possibly, to only a limited degree) by means of both being high quality software and by working with the media. It surely takes longer, but also spends less money which may be usable for better purposes.

* Hosting basic services:
Then there's the hosting of website + masterserver + downloads. For now, that's free, and unless the usage pattern raises considerably, it will remain so.

* Hosting additional services:
If we had a headless game (which is not currently the case and unfortunately not likely to happen so soon), we would possibly want to host a game server for free for the community so that anyone in reach of this server can play network games whenever they want to, that's something I could image would be a nice use of funds. Another option would be to host a Mumble (a free teamspeaker alternative) voice chat server, but then that's not really neccessary either, text chat works well enough so far.

* Hiring someone:
I do not expect that we will want to hire anyone to work on the project, so this is not going to happen either.

* Umbrella projects:
It might make sense to pass some money to an umbrella project which could then use advertising funds to push forward the public exposure of not just MegaGlest but several similar projects. But so far this is just theoretical.

* Philosophically aligned projects:
We could also use such funding to support organisations which, by themselves, support other projects which share our ideals and philosophy, such as the Free Software Foundation (FSF). This is actually something I could imagine us doing.

* Sending out CD-ROMs:
Some people just cannot download large piles of data because it's too expensive in their area in general, or they have a bad contract or an unreliable connection. For these people, we could offer a program to send out CDROMs with the latest stable game version and the most common mods on it. With our Linux and Windows installers and one or two mods you could easily fill up a CD-ROM.

But that's all the uses for money related to MegaGlest I can currently think of. There could be more in the future, which we cannot currently think of right now, and at that point it would be nice to be able to already have some funds available. So this might also be an argument to start collecting at least the very little bit of donations we can already now.

Altogether, I'm still a little undecided, but part of me thinks it might be worth the effort to set it all up. I'm interested in other opinions there, mostly (but not limited to) titi's and softcoders'.

[Psychedelic_hands]

Advertising really won't be possible, but I still totally am against the idea of it. Advertising only ever makes the game seem dodgy, the game should be known because it is good not because it has lots of ads. Which we can do with all the gaming websites that seem interested in glest  .
Even though I don't think anyone would abuse the money, I still seems wrong to make money from free opensource programs. Not that it would earn much money, but still  .

[tomreyn]

To me, the term 'making money' implies that you force people to pay / donate. That's definately not acceptable, and I don't think anyone has this in mind. If anything, completely voluntary donations is something that could be thinkable.
On a side note, please do not mix up the terms 'open source' and 'free (as in beer)' since they have nothing in common other than than that some software whose source code is available to the general public, it is also available for use and/or redistribution free of charge. But that's more of a coincidence.

[Psychedelic_hands]

Making money means getting money, which is what donating causes  . Also, I said "free open source program". Which is what glest is... But what I mean by what I said was, MANY people have worked on Glest, I'm not sure just one person should be incharge of money earned from it.

[titi]

What about the following idea:
We collect all the money we get until we have lets say 50 or 100 Euro. If we have a money we make a MG contest ....
The Winner is the best ranked Intel Graphics card user who will win a real grahics card   

[softcoder]

I like the idea because its community funded and helps benefit low end hardware users in the community. Its the 'help your neighbor' principle from the free software foundation.

[will]

I like the idea of you all ganging together to buy me a mac so I can maintain the MG port on it 

[Omega]

Technically speaking, it'd be possible to advertise purely with free link trades (that is, you advertise them and they advertise you) on smaller, similar sites, but I can't really see the MG site having ads, anyway. Not to mention I bet 90% of the forum (or more) has an adblocker of some kind. I mean, technically, if we wanted to "make money" from ads, there's about a bajillion ways to implement them with SMF. However, the eternal answer to that is NO.

Still, though, there's too many undecided flaws in the "gift" idea. Firstly, there's the difficulty of deciding who the winner would be, shipping, privacy, and above all: even 50 euro may be a bit wishful thinking from a free and open source game (of which the vast majority of the code was made by an entirely different team, as well).

Bottom line: It's just really quite controversial. I see it as easier to not get into that mess at all.

[ultifd]

What about the following idea:
We collect all the money we get until we have lets say 50 or 100 Euro. If we have a money we make a MG contest ....
The Winner is the best ranked Intel Graphics card user who will win a real grahics card   

So only Europeans can participate in this contest? So there's like 5 Europeans...

[titi]

?? if you have money you can order nearly anywhere in the world

and @Omega Noone talked about about adds and all this crap! For this a BIG NO! What we talk about is just a possibility to donate ( and even this is unlikely, so calm down    )

[tomreyn]

What was discussed there regarding advertising was about advertisements promoting the game on other sites, not banner or others on megaglest.org. I don't think the former is a great idea at this point, and I would immediately quite if the second was going to happen. But then, nobody even thought of having ads on megaglest.org because it would be so wrong.

[tomreyn]

Here's an update on donations: Since this was requested a few times now, it's now possible to donate to MegaGlest via Bitcoin, Flattr and Skrill (formerly moneybookers). The donations page on the MegaGlest website can be accessed by clicking on the Donate! link which is located below the social network buttons, available on every web page (on this site).

Reading up more on Paypal I have realized their business practices are even worse than I was previously thinking so I chose not to offer donations through them. However, it is possible to convert your Paypal balance or other e-payment currencies into any of these three currencies at no or minimal fees).

[Coldfusionstorm]

What about the following idea:
We collect all the money we get until we have lets say 50 or 100 Euro. If we have a money we make a MG contest ....
The Winner is the best ranked Intel Graphics card user who will win a real grahics card   

Yes!