Hi,
I think it is time to once again open a topic about donations. The old "Time to Pitch in for SME 8.0" thread seems to have died.
I have been thinking about the status of this project. We current have 3 core developers. 3 Quality and Testing team members and a bunch of Documentation team members. There are various levels of users on this forum from hobbyists and home users, Small businesses and larger Corporations. There are IT professional consultants who have many SME's installed and are charging a monthly maintenance fee.
All this adds up to 16,750 installs per
http://smolt.contribs.org/stats.html. It would seem like a minimum donation of $5 per install would be in reach for most users, even the hobbyists should be able to swing this. It is cheap if only for the education that can be received from the forum. And the opportunity to get your feet wet with an open source server solution.
I would suggest that at the Business and Corporate level a $50 - $100 donation per installed server would be very doable. (I have seen some very sizable IT budgets in some pretty small companies
).
I would suggest from the IT consultant level that $25 added to the cost of a client's server is not going to drive away very many customers. I realize that many of you although not core developers have developed contributions that very much enhance the base distro and for this reason feel that your donations could be somewhat reduced if you are such a contributor.
Almost any software package has some charge for new versions, with SME 8.0 in process I think this is a good time to polish off the conscience and consider helping this distribution go forward.
If you have read clear to here, congratulations. Here is your link to do what you know is right.
http://www.smeserver.org/donate
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