Hi people, I'm Qtera, aka Cpsilent aka Silentwriter. I'm responsible in the last couple of months for contacting the Open Source Projects to which we donate (
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Donation-accepting_organizations_and_projects#Open_source), and as Unthinkingbit says in here
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=233997.msg22703497#msg22703497 the strategy is to fund them even more than we already do.
From all forty of those projects only seventeen entered in the share list. The method of contact them varied among projects: most of the time I used the good-old-and-faithful e-mail just fine, but I also got responses using forums and github. The other ways to contact projects like reddit, twitter or gitlabs weren't successful at all.
From that list, there are five discontinued projects and possibly another one: ArkOS, the Bluetile WM project, The FreeHal, TOR Chat and The PirateLinux distro. But in case of PirateLinux and Tor Chat, they are kind of special cases. Although the Piratelinux is halted, the developer would like to continue in the future and he even gave me his bitcoin address.(
https://github.com/piratelinux/Pirate-Linux/issues/3) In case of the TOR Chat, the former developer told me that the project isn't currently maintained but that the address in there was his and it's active, and he only wants to get donations "...if you want to generally say thanks to me in general, not for this specific project.". In case of these two specific projects they are getting a year of donations to see if they resume their work, if not, the donations will stop.
Another case of posible discontinuance is OpenElec. They have no working email to contact them, but their forums seem active, at least until June 2017. I even logged into their irc channel and a user told me the project was dead. As it didn't seem something official or couldn't find its death clearly posted anywhere else, I opened a forum thread asking about it (
http://openelec.tv/forum/23-feedback/84579-bitcoin-address-for-donations) and there are no answers so far.
Unthinkingbit and I agreed in giving the one-year grace period only to those projects which cared to answer back. However, I'm still waiting for an answer in this case.
The second category is for projects that don't receive bitcoin donations anymore. At the moment it's only OpenGameArt.org:
OpenGameArt.org does not accept BitCoins at this time.
Source:
https://opengameart.org/content/donate-bitcoinsA third category are the projects managed by external foundations, like FSF or GNOME Foundation for instance. In this case, fits MediaGoblin, GIMP and Replicant. Those are active projects, but fiscalized by sponsor organizations. For this reason they are still funded by us.
The projects that use a service like BitPay and Coinbase are RaspBMC (now OSMC, the project changed their name), TOR, Piwik (
https://github.com/piwik/piwik/issues/12232#issuecomment-342360943), LibreOffice, Haiku OS, FreeBSD and Etherpad Foundation (
https://groups.google.com/d/topic/etherpad-lite-dev/X4ostzJOlnc/discussion). In these cases they A) didn't want to switch, B) didn't provide an alternate bitcoin address or C) they simply didn't reply back. Their reasons are wide-ranging, but in most cases they stick to these services just for the simplicity and convenience.
Finally, the projects that use their own wallets and replied to my enquiry promptly are: Apache, DokuWiki, DosBox, Duplicati(
https://forum.duplicati.com/t/bitcoin-donation-address-question/1106), Farmbot, Loomio, MegaGlest, OpenStreetMap, OsmAnd, TOR Servers, VideoLAN, and WikiSpeed.
So, counting the projects from category three, four and the two special cases, there will be founding for 17 projects from that original list. You can check the current complete share list for OS projects in
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cpsilent/devcoinstuff/master/devcoinshare.htmlWell, I think it's everything for now. Happy Holidays everybody!!!
