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The Almighty Buck

Restricted Financial Support for Open-Source? 54

Posted by Cliff from the disparate-financial-options dept.
Anonymous Writer asks: "PayPal has become the standard for making donations to Open-Source projects, and in many cases the only way. Out of the 247 countries and territories represented by top-level domains on the Internet, credit cards are available in 128. However, PayPal only accepts credit cards from 45 of these countries, which excludes 83 from using their service. Nearly two-thirds of the countries on the Internet with valid credit card billing services are currently prevented from making donations using PayPal. Even credit cards issued from those 45 accepted countries with billing addresses not among them are excluded, which affects people working overseas and expatriots. If you want to support the Open-Source Software movement but don't live in a PayPal-accepted country, what are your alternatives?"
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Restricted Financial Support for Open-Source? More

Restricted Financial Support for Open-Source?

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  • Alternatives..... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Reducer2001 ( 197985 ) on Friday February 04, 2005 @04:26PM (#11575799) Homepage
    Report bugs, submit patches, create your own software, and helping people troubleshoot problems in forums are ways to contribute if you live in a country that Pay Pal isn't accepting credit cards from. You can also do this in a country that Pay Pal DOES accept credit cards from, if you're broke.

  • Alternative? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Disconnect ( 5083 )
    Go retro. Send pizza.

  • An Envelope, A Folded Piece of Paper, Cash (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Oliver Wendell Jones ( 158103 ) on Friday February 04, 2005 @04:34PM (#11575878)
    Don't forget a stamp. Any questions?

  • Cannot you transfer money from your bank account? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by wowbagger ( 69688 ) on Friday February 04, 2005 @04:36PM (#11575895) Homepage Journal
    OK, if Paypal will not accept your credit card because you are in East Elbonia, cannot you transfer money from your bank account into your Paypal account?

    Yes, it might mean giving Paypal access to a bank account - but if you are an Internet user in one of the banned countries, might it not be worth creating an account solely to tie to Paypal?

    Yes, it sucks that Paypal is trying to reduce their exposure to fraud and keep their service cheap. But cannot this be worked around?
    • If you aren't in supported country you cannot make a paypal account at all.
    • You need a CC to sign up and then you can link your bank account. They centre their business on you having a CC that they can query for extended information. Those countries that have CC's but are not supported probably don't supply the information paypal thinks it needs to operate. They basically need access to pre-auth requests... which some places don't provide yet or their CC gateway doesn't support yet.

    • Banned? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by fm6 ( 162816 )
      Paypal hasn't "banned" any country. They started out as a U.S.-only operation and have been grandually adding other countries to their system. Given the complexities of international financial transfers, it's hardly suprising that they haven't yet covered the entire planet.
    • You can't even sign up for a Paypal account without a credit card. This,
      incidentally, impacts people in the US too, if we don't have a credit card
      or, possibly due to having done a Google search on Paypal first and turned
      up a hillion jillion horror stories, are unwilling to give Paypal access to
      our full line of credit. I'm in the former category: I'm one of those
      curmudgeons who refuses to have a credit card. There are a plethora of
      reasons for this: I receive more junk mail from the credit card industry
      t
      • Additionally, I view credit cards as a fundamentally bad idea, because they make it very convenient and easy to spend money you obviously cannot afford to spend, because you don't have it.

        This is a point with which I completely agree but is entirely irrelevant to the discussion.

        Although I have no credit cards and never have, I can happily use the credit card network. How? I have a charge card, an American Express card: you must pay it in full every month. I also have a debit card, where the money comes d

  • However you normally send money... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Elwood P Dowd ( 16933 ) <judgmentalist@gmail.com> on Friday February 04, 2005 @04:36PM (#11575899) Journal
    If there isn't enough money involved to justify a credit card merchant account for the OSS group, then send them money however you'd normally send money to an individual in a foreign nation.

    Yeah, that's hard.

    But what the hell does it have to do with Open Source? Or geekery in general?
  • Take some currency, put it in an envelope and mail it. I mean, those Nigerian scammers have some way of getting money out of your bank account. I'm sure it must be easy if you try do it legitimately.
    • Take some currency, put it in an envelope and mail it.

      Why not simply write a cheque? the payee can then just bank it in the normal way. Sure, it probably takes 30 days to clear, but it is much more secure than sending cash, and WAY cheaper than direct transfer from your bank account (at least for all the banks I've used here in Australia).

      Sometimes a low-tech approach is best.

      • My aunt sent me a cheque once. She's in Canada, I'm in the US. My bank took a fair bite of it as a "handling fee" just because it wasn't drawn on US funds. I've never tried depositing foreign currency, so I don't know if they charge a fee for that. I wouldn't think so, although considering how banks operate nowadays... If not, it seems the recipient would be better off getting cash and depositing that, if it is coming from another country.

        For the small amounts most sites typically ask for ($25 or so)
  • For the kind of money that would constitute a significant donation to an open-source project in western civilization, you could train a team of smart teenagers in a third world country into programmers and food, clothe and house them as they create their own damn open source projects. Hell, as Squeak proves, children can be programmers too! High potential children in third world countries are a great area of untapped programmer potential that can only be tapped by open source projects for serious legal reas

  • I have this problem, too (Score:4, Informative)

    by wikinerd ( 809585 ) on Friday February 04, 2005 @05:07PM (#11576205) Journal

    I have been hitted hard by PayPal's decision not to send cheques to my country, which is an EU member.

    I plan to use MoneyBookers [moneybookers.com] instead. I have communicated with their support department for a small problem and my experience was very positive, they seem to care about their customers and they offer very good support.

    Another alternative is iKobo [ikobo.com] which gives you an ATM card to withdraw money from your account.

  • PayPal needs some competition (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Kz ( 4332 ) on Friday February 04, 2005 @06:18PM (#11577261) Homepage
    It's the de-facto money manager on internet, yet the're not regulated as a bank, and they just won't accept most of the world as worth considering.

    I'm a software developer, and since getting full down into open source, i have a BIG software repository to use. and when i get paid for my work, i'd like to set apart some 5-7% and donate it to those OSS projects i've benefited from... but most of them (especially the smaller ones) only have PayPal. so, i can't contribute monetarily.

    of course, i do it the other way, with bug reports and suggestions. sometimes a bit of code. but i know how important is to get money now and then!

    sometimes, i just click on a few of their ads; hoping they'll get some click points.

  • Quit Fixating On "Projects" (Score:3, Insightful)

    by John Hasler ( 414242 ) on Friday February 04, 2005 @07:00PM (#11577787) Homepage
    > If you want to support the Open-Source Software
    > movement but don't live in a PayPal-accepted
    > country, what are your alternatives?"

    Pick a developer (preferably not a big-name one) and mail him a check or money order.
  • http://s1.amazon.com/exec/varzea/subst/fx/help/how -we-know.html [amazon.com]

    Though the recipients need to have a US CC, the donators just need to have Amazon accounts and some way of making payments.

    Not perfect, but may cover some of the people that paypal doesn't. Just be sure to read the docs.
  • Just stick to the damn question, people...
    Oh, wait, I must be new here. Or not. Or... argh !
    Anyway, a short (? yeah right...) recap for the ADHD-like attention span posters.

    PayPal *IS* the most frequently used "online money transaction" tool: pretty easy to use, damn convenient too most of the time, (barely) acceptable service cost (for small sums), etc.
    Because of that, most people that *CAN* use it will use it, and tend to forget other alternatives IF their main purpose ISN'T cashing in massively (for ins

  • Easy. Code for sex. (Score:4, Funny)

    by crazyphilman ( 609923 ) on Friday February 04, 2005 @09:36PM (#11579227) Journal
    If you're a girl, the following steps may not change the world, but they WILL make a lonely, starving open-source coder happy:

    1. Locate an open-source coder.

    2. Approach said coder's dorm room or apartment in a trenchcoat (naked underneath), with a six-pack in one hand and a bag of Chinese food in the other.

    3. When the coder opens the door, announce "I noticed you checked my bug-fix into CVS this afternoon! Let's celebrate!" Lean back so the trenchcoat opens up, and hold up the beer and Chinese food.

    4. Be ready to administer CPR if the coder has a heart attack.

  • Western Union [westernunion.com]. Online, 1-800, or in person. Their fees aren't the cheapest, though. I just tried, as an experiment, pricing sending $50 from the US to Gambia or Korea. The Western Union fee was $20.

    But it can be done.

  • Just don't send money, send a gift...Send them a copy of Windows XP.

  • You could have a wishlist [amazon.co.uk] over at the friendly one-click creating Amazon?

    I've had one for a few years to support some [debian-adm...ration.org] of my work [gnump3d.org].

    Occaisionally I receive something and it's a nice bonus to actually getting something done.

    Of course it doesn't work out so well when your code gets added to Linux distributions and nobody gets it from your website directly anymore - that was the thing that I noticed which made the initial donations tail off.

    Still I do earn a little bit every now and again doing remote support

  • By their disservice, banks became my enemies. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Maljin Jolt ( 746064 ) on Sunday February 06, 2005 @01:37PM (#11590476) Journal
    If you want to support the Open-Source Software movement but don't live in a PayPal-accepted country, what are your alternatives?

    For me as an OSS developer, none. Micropayments were forbidden by law here in Czech Republic several years ago, killing lot of fresh internet companies. Banks would not give away their monopolies easily: every money transaction from abroad would cost me at least 50USD deducted from my account, no matter what the sender pays to his bank for the transaction. So, it is cheaper for me to code for free.

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