Donations for Raspbian

[mpthompson]

This is always a delicate subject, but I wanted to let Raspbian users know that I've enabled Paypal donations on the Raspbian web site to support development related costs:

http://www.raspbian.org/RaspbianDonate

Just so people are aware, to create the Raspbian autobuild cluster, so far my out-of-pocket expenses are about $2000 in equipment, another $700 for equipment on order and an on-going monthly expense of about $100 for unlimited bandwidth hosting of the Raspbian public repository. Oh, and $40 for a Raspberry Pi .

I've been holding off on asking for donations because I wanted to make sure that Raspbian had enough momentum behind it to become an on-going project. I believe that threshold has been met and, although it's not a polished distribution yet, it seems to show a lot of promise of becoming one of the leading Linux distribution for the Raspberry Pi.

It would be terrific if I donations could at least partially cover expenses related to Raspbian development. It would also help me give my wife confidence that the time I spend on Raspbian is worthwhile and useful to people. She's a little skeptical and fears my "hobby" could turn into a money pit.

Finally, I can assure people that any money raised for Raspbian will indeed be applied to further development of Raspbian. Right now, the systems we are using for the autobuild cluster are barely adequate to build the Debian derived packages. It's not too hard to foresee packages that soon will be outside the capabilities of the Freescale iMX53 Quick Start Boards we're using -- something the Debian armhf team is contemplating as well. This will likely require us to purchase newer, more powerful hardware in the future to keep up with the build requirements -- something that would be nice to have funded by the community.

In any case, I just wanted to make people aware that Raspbian is now collecting donations. If you prefer to wait and see how the project evolves, that's perfectly fine. Just keep in mind that if you do start using Raspbian on a regular basis, that a donation of at least a few dollars will help ensure that development continues.

I sincerely appreciate everyone's support of the Raspbian project so far and I look forward to seeing what the future will bring us users of the Raspberry Pi.

Mike Thompson
Raspbian Project Lead

[Montala]

I wish you every success with the Project, and am sorry that I could not donate more, but I am very impressed with what I have seen so far, and hope to be able to add a further donation later.

Keep up the good work!

[tk321]

Thanks for your great work! This is a bit off topic but do you think the debian guys would be willing to host the repository so at least you could reduce running costs and switch to a cheaper hosting package?

[Elegor]

You may have already considered and dismissed this idea, but have you thought about using 'cloud' services to do some of this work, rather than investing cash in lots of physical hardware? Both Rackspace and Amazon offer scalable Linux environments that could be used for builds, and on the surface they don't seem to be that expensive.

I only have limited experience in this area though, so there may be hidden costs/issues that I'm not aware of!

[TenderLoins]

Donated.

Thanks for all your hard work sir

[ian.macarthur123]

Cheers Mike,

Any thought of adding a button for other currencies ? (by which I specifically mean GB Pounds of course, at least in my case...)

Given the current parlous state of the Euro, that might even be better bet (for a change!)

[Montala]

... and that was one of the reasons I decided to donate in US dollars, rather than Euros!

Also I believe that Mike is actually located in America anyway... if that makes any difference?

[RandomDuck]

Raspbian makes the Pi usable for everyday simple tasks and I am enjoying the ride as it develops so I contributed.

Thanks for everyones hard work.

[mpthompson]

Any thought of adding a button for other currencies ? (by which I specifically mean GB Pounds of course, at least in my case...)

Duh. I should have included the British Pound... I'll take care of that later today.

I noticed that Paypal does include an extra fee for currency conversion, but it's probably easiest to include other currencies for donors. I'm not sure how donations of dollars are handled when made outside the US as I don't see the currency conversion fee in that case.

[Baranyk]

Donated. Thanks for the hard work, gents!

[Davespice]

£50 from David Honess.

[Steep]

The kids don't really have to eat this week donated.

[DavidK]

£15 on its way.

[mpthompson]

I want to extend a big thank you to everyone for their donations for Raspbian. So far, we've raised just over $600 to help cover expenses related to the project. I believe Raspbian is on a trajectory to become one of the leading Linux distributions for the Raspberry Pi and these donations will definitely help us apply more resources to make that possible.

Thanks again everyone.

Mike Thompson

[bigsi111]

Mike - I've donated - now get Chromium working

[three14]

Can't seem to get http://www.raspbian.org/ to load at the moment, but when it does I'll be sending some cash your way. Thanks for everything.

[plugwash]

seems nginx wasn't running for some reason, I just started it up again

[three14]

Donated $20 USD to start.

[Zinahe]

Thank you. $25.

[oztrailrider]

Donated $15 USD to start.Thanks for all your effort with Raspbian Mike!.

[mkhllr]

$50. incoming. Thanks!

[gregeric]

Bumped thread & donations total.

£50 to thank you both & further encourage.

[Vukkabi]

Donated. Will repeat periodically.

Was running Debian build for a week or so. Switched to Raspbian. Loving it!

Thank you Sir for your hard work and for making this available to many others like me.

[williamhbell]

Hi Mike.
Thanks for your work leading and contributing to Raspbian. A donation has just been sent.
Best regards, Will

[mpthompson]

I want to continue to thank everyone for the donations to Raspbian. We've just cleared $1000 and this will help put a dent into the investments initially made to create the Raspbian build cluster and other associated hardware expenses. I don't have the total expenses at my finger tips right now, but I believe they are about $2800 with the latest hardware purchases. I'll be doing some accounting later this week to better account for expenses and donations.

Three new Freescale iMX53 QSB build servers with hard drives will be coming on-line later this week (for a total of eight) to help clear out the daily updates from Debian of armhf packages that need to be rebuilt and added to the Raspbian repository. This extra build server capacity will also help us get to building the Debian contrib and non-free packages for Raspbian after the Wheezy freeze in the next few weeks. We've also purchased an additional Freescale iMX53 QSB and hard drive for plugwash that he can use for local development and builds of Raspbian packages without the overhead of a transatlantic link to the build cluster.

Thanks again everyone for helping Raspbian come a long ways over the last three months.