“Donations” – yeah right. Stop the madness.
Augh! I can’t begin to name off all of the sites I’ve been browsing lately that encourage you to send them a little bit of financial support and in turn get extra features. They call it a “donation.” This pisses me off beyond belief.
Folks, if you’re limiting access to the site or turning off essential features like thread subscriptions to non-donors, it’s not a “donation”, it’s a paid subscription. Start calling it what it is. People are still supporting you, you’re just more honest with what these bonuses are really for.
The thing that gets me the most is open source and free (as in beer) software projects that beg for donations because they need to take care of development costs. Get f#cking real. I’m a software developer, remember? I’ve spent exactly $29.00 to develop Enano CMS. The only resource we have that isn’t freely available is a VPS graciously donated to us by Network Redux. Granted I haven’t done any advertising, but even the total of $40 Enano has received in direct financial donations has been more than sufficient to keep the project financially healthy and obviously $10 a year (usually less) to renew the domain is really not a concern. Hell, I could probably get that for free if I bitched about it enough.
Open Source projects can be run without racking up costs. Developers need to stop trying to monetize them and turn them into huge conglomerate projects that will support them for life and instead treat side projects as side projects. It might mean development happens slower, but what if software developers weren’t so damned serious all the time? Who knows. Maybe we’d see more honest effort instead of just hustling to add this and that feature.
This goes out to any software developer that has resorted to annoying users into donating, and to myself as a way of reminding me what my goals for Enano, Greyhound, and all my other projects are.
(Editing note: Originally written in August 2008, but not finished. Published December 2008.)