Wednesday 29 March 2006

Beggars can’t be choosers

There’s many software projects I would donate to, but don’t because they don’t take paypal. Why does this matter?

Paypal is quick, doesn’t involve getting my wallet out and typing in a long credit card number and trying not to make a mistake. And I don’t want to give me credit card number to every random Joe who is short of cash.

The latest is OpenSSH. I don’t know if they have particularly severe financial problems, but I use openssh often enough that I figure I owe them some money.

So I click on the make a donation to the OpenSSH project link, but they don’t take paypal. So I click on the Discuss this article on the forum link so I can suggest "Hey guys, why don’t you take paypal?" but I have to register first… already I can’t be bothered.

It’s a similar story with the Debian Software Foundation, and Advocates For Free Government, both vaguely worthy causes in need of a bit of cash, but they don’t make it easy to give.

So I didn’t.

On the other hand I pay £3 a month to Cedega so I can play battlefield2 under linux.

Sam

UPDATE:

Thanks Natalia (below);

From OpenSSH Donations at:
http://www.openssh.com/donations.html

I go to:
https://https.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/donations

and then:
http://www.openbsd.org/donations.html

and I can donate to OpenBSD via paypal.

I didn’t find this very obvious. That link on the OpenSSH donations page talked about credit cards, not paypal, hence I didn’t click.

I want to donate to OpenSSH not OpenBSD - yes I can recognize that 2 pages away from the paypal page it said I could mark the payment for "OpenSSH" but I’m beginning to lose confidence that my money will go to OpenSSH. DFSG (Debian) donations also got this complicated.

However, I have now made a donation to OpenBSD put down to OpenSSH

Natalia, thanks ot you OpenSSH has another $20

3 comments:

  1. Natalia Gorbski29 March 2006 at 09:39

    They do. Look at the donations page on the OpenBSD site, which is linked from the donations page on the OpenSSH site, they clearly identify Paypals as one of the manners by which you can donate.

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  2. If someone wanted to, they could shutdown any site accepting paypal within a day. Just make donations with 5+ stolen credit cards.

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  3. However as I recall the BSD guys mocked me while I was querying if the money was supporting OpenBSD or OpenSSH - making out that I was some kind of fool for thinking they were different.

    Mocking a person who is trying to express gratitude and pay money strikes e as bad form on two levels and I wonder if that is typical of the BSD guys.

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