There was a period, which at the time seemed to go on forever (something to do with the banal conversations) but in retrospect was relatively short, in which ‘disintermediating’ was the hottest buzz word around and everyone wanted to be doing it. It was the wave of the future, and to anyone in the industry obviously inevitable; just like online pet food stores. Which is by way of saying, Sourceforge is now positioning itself as an intermediary for funding open source software development.

Sourceforge is hoping to be a central location where you can donate to individuals, projects, open source foundations, and of course Sourceforge. In exchange for handling the donations (and in the hope of being more sustainable) SF will take a 5% cut on all transaction (accept donations to Sourceforge, in which case they take a 100% cut one would suppose). The system needs work both from a technical (they currently only support payment via PayPal!?!), and conceptual (I don’t think this, or the recently announced bounties are going to be all that effective), but it is nice to see people experimenting with different funding models.

I’ve included the introduction to the project that was sent out in the Sourceforge developers newsletter, as it doesn’t seem to have been published online anywhere.

During last months update, I announced SF.NET donation program, which allows people to help cover of the costs of running SourceForge.net. It has been a success and I would like to thank everyone who has given to SourceForge.net and welcome further donations. You can view contributors here at: http://sourceforge.net/supporters.php

In this update, we are improving on this donation system. Today we are launching a system that allows users to not only donate to SF.NET, but also to their favorite projects. Many project admins need money to help cover the costs of the equipment they use and/or time they have spent developing their code. This built-in system will allow Open Source projects to generate supplemental income from our 750,000 registered users.

Project admins can decide if they want to give a portion of their proceeds to non-profits that support Open Source, such as the Open Source Initiative, Python, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Gnome Foundation, etc. If you are a project admin, the SF.NET team will be sending you an additional email to you explaining this process in greater detail. Projects will need to ”opt-in” in order to accept donations.

Besides projects accepting donations, users on SF.NET will be able to do so, as well. Again this is an ”opt-in” feature. Starting today, if a user replies to your email with helpful information, responds to a support request, or is just overly helpful to you, you can now give him/her a few dollars to show your appreciation. Given how much time one can save with the guidance of a knowledgeable developer, this new system is a good way for everyone to win. If projects and users receive money for doing what they love: developing and supporting software, this could prove to be a successful business model that in turn could allow them to provide their services full time. It will be interesting to see how many people open their wallets to support the software they use everyday. I”ll report in future sitewide updates how the system is doing and whether this experiment is a success. If you see a ($) next to a users name, it means that they have opted-in to receive money. Clicking on the dollar sign brings up their donation page.

A few other tidbits of information about this new donation system: SF.NET is taking a 5% piece of the transaction fee. It is our hope that this small percentage will help us finance the donation system and help cover some of the other costs of running the site. In releasing this new donation system, we are also updating our privacy statement and terms of service document. Please take some time to view these new documents. You can access them from the footer on any SourceForge.net page. We have added wording about the new donation program and additional text to make these legal documents more readable.

See SF.net Donation System for more info.