Re: [GNU-linux-libre] Facilitating payments/contributions to developers

[Jaromil]

On Wed, 16 Jan 2013, Nicolás Reynolds wrote:

> El 15/01/13 09:42, John Sullivan dijo:
> > It would be nice if free distributions could support giving
> > donations to the authors of their packages. 
> 
> This is related to Jaromil's thread about adbard and a general
> question about sustaining libre distributions, no?

somehow yes and I'm glad something is moving in that direction.

however, what John talks about here is slightly different and also
matching an old discussion InI have with big distributions like Debian:
to give correct credit to "upstream", for instance a link to their
webpage (which is there since not so long..) and a mention on the
package, to say the least, as a possibility to direct people to their
donation page.

often such a discussion resulted in a simple conclusion: single software
packages have an "about" screen or menu item or link on commandline that
direct to their page, that's their occasion to advertise to the users
what are the ways to support developers.

this does makes sense, but I still think that a webpage listing url
links and names of "upstream" is useful since that is online and gets
indexed by search engines and visited with a browser. furthermore, such
a list (which could be an outsources service by the Free Software
Directory itself, somehow?) *should* be advertised on the donation page
as an option to direct one's donation to a specific package rather than
to the distribution. But then I'm not sure what is your experience, when
it comes to tell what people *should* do there isn't a good solution on
the table...

referring to my outing in the previous thread you mention: this thread
indirectly solves my own problem, since I am preferably an "upstream"
developer and I would have put much more effort in that if it would have
represented an income (a la "app market", so to say, but with donations
which were instead capitalised by aggregators...)

My conclusion on the topic is quick: the solution proposed by John here
is already implemented by about popups and could be improved by
completing the upstream references shown by web package browsers and by
improving our own access to update the Free Software Directory.

Still the main income online does not comes from donations, as
philantropy per se will always make it "rain where is already wet".
I think ethical ads would provide a way more substantial income.

Since I sense a general lazyness from FSF on the topic :^) I suggest the
shortcut would be to open a channel with Google Ads to ask them if they
can add a category about free and open source software and services.

ciao

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