On 2-4-2009 18:00, Saul Luizaga wrote:
> Since I didn't find a NG to make this suggestion I'll make it here.
> 
> I think is just plain wrong not to make POV-Ray donationware, since you 
> made the IIRC and the keyrings to finance your expenses right? And the 
> more advanced POV-Ray gets the more expensive it gets to release it, so 
> why not some acceptable number of ads and some donation acceptance to 
> help with it? Is so noble that POV-Ray is free and that is one more 
> reason we all love it but you don't develop or have a wesite on love 
> alone, I mean I think the POV-Team needs a hand here IMO, don't they?. 
> Much less simpler programs charge 5-40 $us and most of them can be done 
> with little programming knowledge and others get Paypal or PayByCash or 
> other contributions.
> 
> I simply find it not fair at all POV-Ray not being donationware.
> 
> Cheers.
Any idea who should receive the money? Chris as a sort of leader of the 
pack? So he can pay income tax on it? Distribute it to all contributors 
according to how much they did? You surely can see the problem with that.
The only useful things I can think of doing with money in an open source 
collective effort like this are
- keep the website running, but that seems to have been taken care of, 
although I don't know the details.
- award real prices in the competitions and even that may be handled 
better by sponsoring.

In short, directly financing the development is not a good idea, for 
anything else you need to create a foundation OSLT and that would 
probably cost more time and money than it would attract.

Other opinions welcome.

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