Bitcoin Forum

With all the talk and good ideas about driving adoption I'm surprised there isnt more discussion of how to get open source development projects to accept BTC for donations. I see that Diaspora is accepting now and I'm sure there are others but I have to think that given the tech savvy nature and where BTC is at in it's maturity that more projects should be able to accept donations in BTC.

What's stopping them? Awareness? Is it really that much easier to setup for Paypal donations? What can we as a community do to make it easy for more developers to accept donations in bitcoin?

I'd be willing to contribute 100 BTC or so to a open source development fund that could be offered to be spread across the first x open source dev projects that setup a prominent way to accept BTC as donations. I suppose there would have to be some kind of qualification process to be sure I was contributing to projects that actually had some momentum and worth; not necessarily for bitcoin projects, though.

I also fantasize that someday freelance job finding sites like oDesk or eLance would someday accept BTC as a means of paying for services.

Anyone else have ideas or motivation here?

I'm sure if you contact anyone with a bitcoin project and tell them you would like to donate they will give you a btc address.

all the sites listed here http://www.thebitcoinreview.com/ (http://www.thebitcoinreview.com/) can now add to their listing a btc donation address.  (thanks for the idea, cottoneyeJoe)

*note* this site is in "pre-alpha" - lots more features to come.

Cool site. Naturally people with bitcoin projects are going to be hip to setting up a donation address.

I'm curious what we can do to get more "mainstream" open source projects to accept bitcoin? Paypal seems to be the dominant/exclusive means.

The folks over at the Tortise SVN project blog have some gripes about "How Paypal screws open source projects" http://tortoisesvn.net/howpaypalscrewsopensourceprojects.html (http://tortoisesvn.net/howpaypalscrewsopensourceprojects.html) noting things like

- sudden/random closure of account & long process to get any resolution to denying donations.

Paypal's own help/FAQ about open source donations casts a fair bit of doubt about it being supported: https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/Donations-and-Fundraising/Donations-to-open-source-project/td-p/62123 (https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/Donations-and-Fundraising/Donations-to-open-source-project/td-p/62123)

Here are a few projects/places that I think should be targeted for accepting btc donations:

SourceForge.net is one of the larger open source project hosting providers. It has a pre-boiled feature to allow projects can turn on to accept PayPal donations. How easy would it be to let them also accept BTC?

Open Source Initiative. http://www.opensource.org/donate (http://www.opensource.org/donate) accepts PayPal and something called NetworkForGood.

TrueCrypt, a tool that many BTC'ers used before the client supported encryption supports only PayPal. http://www.truecrypt.org/donations/?lnk=5 (http://www.truecrypt.org/donations/?lnk=5)

BTC seems like such a natural and low-friction way for projects accept donations free from the whims and poor oversight of things like PayPal. Of course, the matter of donators acquiring BTC to be able to make a donation with is not as simple as credit card, but I suspect that at least some reasonable proportion of tech savvy folks that would be willing to donate already have some BTC holdings?

What can we as a community do to make more open source projects aware of the option and help them use it?

i say contact them directly.

let them know you would like to give them a donation.
explain to them why you don't want to use paypal.
and introduce them to bitcoin.
1 by 1

I'm sure ALL open-source project developers will Love Bitcoin! and will become a bitcoiner as soon as they know about it :P

I wonder just how many tech savvy poeple have not heard about bitcoin yet? 0% 50%?

I don't just want sites to give me a BTC address I want the reciprocity.  If they accept BTC funds make it public have it on their contribution page. Maybe have a counter showing how generous people have been in BTC donations.  If BTC is this secret.  "Hey do you take BTC donations... oh yeah sure send it to 1xyz" that doesn't help the overall economy.  You know branding/mindshare/eyeball counts.

That's a good idea but possibly not one that all projects would want to make public.

I'm thinking of a FAQ/How To guide that can be distributed to open source projects to explain why and how they can accept BTC donations.

One thing that should already be possible is some kind of service that provides a javascript widget that projects can embed on their donation pages if they wish to advertise how much as been donated.

Seems like it would just be a matter of them telling the service what public address they use for donations, then the service just monitors the block chain for incoming against that address and will provide the counter on-demand.

I notice the folks supporting the OWS and Diaspora donation attempts have sigs that list the total accumulated but havent looked into the implementation. Should be pretty easy and probably could be explained in a FAQ already.

That's exactly why I wrote https://fundhub.org/, it can be a way to fund OSS for bitcoin projects.

Basically you pledge bitcoins on a ticket/issue that you want to be fixed or implemented. And the person that does the job collects bitcoins.

Just noticed this thread - you guys might be interested in my upcoming open source project - as well as an entirely new methodology for creating web applications (called Software Manufacturing) its very first "live project" will be its own project management application that uses a completely new model for BTC project funding (not just funding per "ticket" but allows for specific funding to be donated to task areas and even entire projects and allowing all donations/payments to be publicly traced via the block chain).

A sneak preview can be seen here: http://ciyam.org/sample (http://ciyam.org/sample) and any developers interested in "getting on board" prior to the actual release feel free to PM me for more details.


Cheers,

Ian.

See:

Fundhub.org - pay bitcoins for solving github issues
gittip.com - recurring donations to specific github account
https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/14 - gittip developers are interested in bitcoin, since credit cards suck ass.

I really like this kind of ideas, since I love open source and bitcoin. These could be also a business - just take a cut from the payments.