Donations don't work?

#1 When the web market collapsed one of the things we did was to place donation buttons at Gamesnet. At the time we had pretty good traffic numbers, with a hundred thousand or so unique visitors per day. In about a year we had a total of just over $100. I just don't think it's viable to expect people to give you money out of the kindness of their hearts of they don't need to. It sounds good, but it seldom works.

#2 Several years ago I was involved in Anti-Cheat software. While nothing we did was open source, there were a couple of less popular games that we supported for donations. I think we brought in a total of about $2000 over 3 years in donations from those 2 game communities. It really wasn't even enough to cover the server costs, but being able to support a couple of older games for (basically) free was decent PR, and the donations did help a little.

But yeah, you'd definitely never be able to eat off of donations. People are rarely willing to give up money when they don't have to.

#3 Exactly. I'll be frank, I love open-source stuff, but I've never donated. Partly, there's a barrier because I don't have a credit card - going to the effort to borow from my parents is a big enough put-off to ensure I don't go through with it. But on top of that, if you're giving stuff away free, you shouldn't expect to make a profit from it. If you can't support yourself some other way, maybe giving away freebies isn't the greatest idea.
Now, that said (and I'm being harsh), I think it'd be great if more people donated, myself included. But I don't think it's reasonable to expect that to happen.

#4 As a suggestion, after seeing your site, if you want donations I'd use something other than that Sourceforge banner. It really kinda looks like one of those "powered by" images that people mostly filter out. If I didn't know what I was looking for, I never would have known that you even accepted donations.

Throw a Paypal Donate button somewhere a little more prominent on your page, and possibly make it an option in the software itself where it can be seen.

#5 Here are some numbers from eMule (a peer-to-peer file sharing client):

Installer downloads current version: 11,591,600
Donations July 2009: something around $330 (rough calculation)

Maybe this team reaches $4000 a year - not very much for millions of downloads...

#6 Hey guys, thanks for the input!
I never really expected to make money with those plugins, but I was really suprised that we didn't receive any donation at all over the years... but maybe Gerald is right, the donation link could be more prominent and there should be a link from within the program group or the application itself... maybe I'll do that just to try it out ;)
But it's really sad that all those guys writing terrific plugins, modules and whatnot for the various communities out there only get complaints and feature whishes instead of a "Thank you!" in any form... at least for the most part it seems.
Overall I guess if you need to make money with open source (fortunatly, I don't) the only way to do so is by selling support (email, phone, installation services, custom extensions, documentation, etc.) - although that won't work with every product (certainly not for the JEdit plugins e.g.).

#7 In most communities I'd say that I rarely see people getting donations for open source work that they produce, One place where it does seem to work is XDA-Developers, example here, where people release custom builds of Mobile phone software for HTC based devices.

In general though it doesn't bring much revenue in.

#8 Open Source doesn't really work if you're the sole contributor to a given product.

By "contributor" I don't mean just monetary contributions.

Source-code contributions, bug reports, feature requests, documentation, or even simply being part of the community are all extremely valuable contributions.

As an open source developer I would much rather have those types of contributions than a monetary contribution.

"most people just complain if something doesn't work 100% as expected or if certain features are missing"

Those "complaints" are invaluable contributions. Sometimes that's all a person is capable of contributing, but something is better than nothing.

A good technical user that knows how to use the software and finds a bug or feels that a certain feature is missing and voices those concerns is making a more valuable contribution than someone using the software and donating a few bucks.

Also, having multiple contributors working on a project or groups of projects allows you to multiply your forces.

For instance, Fractured Universe, my MMO game that I've been developing for the past few years, utilizes a bunch of open source software for the game engine, MMO framework and game development IDE.

Weighing in at over one million lines of code, I've only had to write 20% of it.

That is the true power of FOSS.

#9 try this for your website:
www.chipin.com

#10 I have only donated once and it was $200. I have donated but you expect everyone to donate on everything we download. We only have so much money and I only donate if its a super good product that helped allot.

#11 Another way to make money with Open Source is dual-licensing, which seems to work well for some. Qt is a good example. The library is LGPL, with an optional commercial license that allows you to modify it without having to publish your code. Plus access to additional commercial support.

#12 If you have a site that downloads 11,600,000 times you stand a better chance of making money with advertising on your download page than with donations.

I will donate if I use open source software enough. What I hate the most is actually paying for software then not using it because it didn't do as promised. You can't complain if it's free:)

#13 Downloads total: approx. 9000 * $0.02 = us$180 with google :D

#14 I have always donated to products and code I have used, but I noticed that I usally get a personal email thanking me (which I thought was odd at the time). Also if I ever asked questions later I usally received a quick response from the developer.

I always thought if there are so many people downloading then they would be getting lots of donations. It's too bad, I guess it's better to sell something for at least a $1 than to release it for free if you need funds to further develop or support it.