[OpenAFS] Donate to The OpenAFS Project

[Garance A Drosihn]

Hi Esther...

I was wondering if you found out to what extent we could earmark
some donations sent in via the Usenix page for OpenAFS.  I am not
expecting some absurdly-strict earmarking, where every penny must
accounted for and go exactly where I want it to go.  But I *would*
like some feeling that my contribution is going to encourage work
on the platforms that I am actually using.

I was reminded about this topic because of some people on one of the
FreeBSD lists.  They are looking for a good distributed filesystem
for their FreeBSD systems, and they at least claim that they'd
contribute to OpenAFS, if they had some confidence it would result
in progress towards a reliable OpenAFS client for FreeBSD...

I understand what you're saying about limitations on how much funds
donated to a 501c3 can be earmarked.  So maybe we can't earmark it
in a strict financial sense, but maybe we could at least "tag it"
as coming from someone interested in certain platforms?  Just
something so that the advisory board responsible the OpenAFS fund
will know which platforms have people who are seriously interested
in OpenAFS.  I suspect that they would like to know this, if for
no other reason than to have happy donors who then make additional
donations as they see progress being made on the platforms they
care about...

I did take a quick look at the donation page.  From what I saw, it
doesn't have any kind of comment field that would be passed along
to the people responsible for allocating the money.  So, right now
it is not even *possible* for them to have any idea what platforms
the donors are interested in.  This seems less than ideal to me.

...but I really do understand how getting special instructions with
every little donation could cause way too many headaches.  Sigh.
Maybe we just have to look for some other way to encourage the exact
progress we are most interested in.


  - - - - - - -  [older messages:]
Back on Jan 26/2005, Esther Filderman wrote:
>I will look into it.
>
>Note that due to the nature of a 501c3, there are probably
>restrictions on how or what earmarking can be done, if at all.
>
>e.
>
>
>On Wed, 26 Jan 2005, Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> wrote:
>  > At 11:34 PM -0500 1/25/05, Esther Filderman wrote:
>  > >
>  > >  http://www.usenix.org/about/openafs/ has all the information
>  > >  you need.  You can send a check to USENIX or you can make a
>  > >  secure, online credit card donation.
>  >
>>  This is a good idea.  Can we earmark donations at all?  I'm sitting
>>  in a office full of MacOS 10, FreeBSD and OpenBSD machines, and we
>>  (RPI) also use OpenAFS on some of our Linux servers.  Can we donate
>  > towards particular OS-platforms?

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad@gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad@freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih@rpi.edu