Re: donations and paypal
On Mon, Nov 17, 2014 at 10:55 AM, Sylvestre Ledru <sylvestre@debian.org> wrote:
> On 17/11/2014 10:15, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
>> On 17/11/14 at 16:09 +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
>>> On Mon, Nov 17, 2014 at 4:02 PM, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
>>>
>>>> However, this is not a reason to bounce my email from -www@ to -project@
>>>> without making it clear that you did that (by forwarding it instead of
>>>> bouncing it, for example).
>>>
>>> FTR, I was the one who bounced the message, not David.
>>
>> Ah, then I apologize for blaming David.
>>
>> But given that you chose to move this discussion to -project@, I'd like
>> to extend to you the same questions I asked to David.
>>
>> As I already wrote, I totally agree that Paypal is far from perfect,
>> and, if there were some FLOSS-friendly payment processors available, I
>> would love to see Debian advertise and use them. There's a simple path
>> to scratch that itch: help design FLOSS-friendly payment processors, and
>> help our TOs support them.
>>
>> However, in the meantime, I don't think that the problems with Paypal
>> are a sufficient condition to refrain from using it. I actually see this
>> discussion as similar to the one about the use of CDNs: CDNs are more an
>> infrastructure issue than a free software issue; payment processors are
>> a financial issue, not a free software issue.
> As the Debian France treasurer, I am glad we have Paypal available and used.
> That simplifies a lot the daily "maintenance" of the association in term
> subscriptions (the accounting is automatically updated when a new person
> subscribes to the association).
>
> Bank transfer can be a pain in some banks; dealing with checks and cashes
> take a lot of time. Paypal, despite all its flaws, is great for what we
> are doing in Debian France.
>
> To avoid leaving too much money on Paypal, from time to time, we transfer
> most of the cash from the Paypal account to our bank account.
>
> Cheers,
> Sylvestre
As someone who's pretty heavily involved in fundraising for Debian, I'd like to
express my support for adding Paypal to the list of official methods to donate
to Debian.
Largely I base this support upon that fact that if someone is interested in
donating to Debian, and they already have a Paypal account, it becomes
a very easy task for them. (Less than 30 secs.)
For those who have financially contributed to Debian to date, we're very
grateful, but also acknowledge it could be easier, as it's currently a 5-10
minute process that requires many fields to be filled out, of which many
require looking up additional data.
If you aren't a Paypal user, and don't wish to use Paypal, adding Paypal
support will have minimum impact on the processes you have been using.
There a a number of things that should be made clear:
1) We have no plans to EVER make Paypal the only way to donate to Debian.
2) We don't plan to keep significant funds stored in Paypal.
3) Every Trusted Organization that Debian works with either currently accepts
Paypal, or plans to.
4) Paypal does not require the use of any non-DFSG compliant software,
including Javascript to make donations. Because of this, most of our
peer Free Software organization accept Paypal.
5) Accepting Paypal does not preclude us from exploring other, new,
payment processing systems, as long as they allow us to integrate
with them without using non-DFSG software, and don't require
donors to use non-DFSG software. If you have a system you'd
like us to integrate with, we're willing to explore it, with the caveat
we don't have a lot of human bandwidth, so it would likely take
time to evaluate and integrate new services.
Please weigh in. Some possible responses might be:
1) I use Paypal, and would be grateful for this addition
2) I don't use Paypal, but wouldn't mind this being a choice for those that do
3) I don't use Paypal, and am opposed to making this an option
4) $%^& Paypal, what about Bitcoin?
5) I don't care, I trust folks working on fundraising to make sane decisions
If we don't hear back, at some point we'll move forward with adding a Paypal
option to https://www.debian.org/donations
-Brian
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