[Xymon] Handling donations (especially commercial ones)

[Henrik Størner]

Hi everyone,

I've been contacted off-list by a long-time Xymon user, who had some 
thoughts about how companies can help the Xymon project along by 
donating some money to the project. We discussed this a bit, and he 
suggested that I float my ideas on the mailing list for input - and gave 
me permission to quote from his e-mails.

He wrote:

"I realise (along with others) that you put a huge effort into xymon and 
given that our company uses the application extensively I would like to 
push to get the company to donate something on a regular basis. It may 
not be big but that’s something we can work on over time.

"I've been involved in another open source project for a while now and 
what they did was to create an association based in Germany to which 
payments can be given to a dedicated bank account. This model works for 
our company from a donation point of view but I was just wondering if 
you had any plans to do something similar?"


After thinking about this for a while, I think I can see some issues 
that companies might have with donating to the project via PayPal, which 
is currently the only option. There was another user recently who sent 
me a nice donation, but apparently it felt awkward enough for them to do 
so via PayPal that they contacted me directly afterwards, to make sure 
that the donation really did come through.


The recent discussion about "Big environment" deployments of Xymon 
clearly shows that there are some places where Xymon is *really* used a 
lot. So maybe there are more companies who could be convinced to support 
Xymon - me - with donations.


So what I came up with was this:

"I do have a company registered here in Denmark, so perhaps I should
consider using that for accepting corporate donations. Then I can
provide genuine invoices, VAT-numbers etc - all the stuff that companies 
normally expect when they buy software. And they can transfer the amount 
to an official bank account with a proper IBAN bank account number ..."


And to make this a bit more formalised, I've added this page to the 
Xymon website: http://www.xymon.com/license/


It is important for me to emphasize that Xymon is, and always will be, 
available free of charge under an open source license - regardless of 
how or where it is being used. So when I write about "buying a license" 
to use Xymon, it is only because that is the kind of language most 
manager-types can understand (hmm, I sincerely hope I didn't offend 
anyone with that blatant generalisation). You will not be required to 
buy a license - but it gives you a really nice feeling :-)


I'd appreciate any thoughs you have about this, and if You'd rather 
discuss it off-list just mail me directly.


Regards,
Henrik