Bear with me for a moment, my fellow monks...

It has recently come to my attention that I'm going to have to begin thinking about developing a donation-type of system for an Open Source project I contribute heavily to, Plucker.

A commercial company has taken our software and is using it in violation of the spirit and letter of the license which binds it (the GNU General Public License, aka GPL).The FSF has appointed an attorney to work on our behalf, and she's been dong great. Her current arrangement doesn't allow her to take our case to litigation, however, under pro bono terms, so we have to find a way to fund legal fees should the case persue towards litigation. We've already been threatened four times with a lawsuit by the CEO of this company if we even consider taking him to court.

"If we end up in court, I will bankrupt these guys."
-- CEO, $this_company

I've seen at least three ways to handle this:

1. PayPal "generic" account for the project team

   Using PayPal makes it easier to donate from the website, offloading the credit card verification from us, but is not FDIC insured facility.

2. SSL certificate on the server + credit card verification/payment system

   Having an official Thawte SSL certificate will bolster confidence in the donator. It verifies origin, is secure, and allows direct credit card processing. Unfortunately, it's also expensive.

3. "Snail mail"/Postal Mail

   This is the most-broad, since everyone in the world can send in a postal mail donation, if this was the only way to donate, many would not. It's slow, requires a lot of manual work, and doesn't work well with international funds.

I'm fairly confident I can develop the perl on the server-side to support this, but I'm wondering if any others have built similar systems, and how did you go about it?

Any gotchas?

Any particular modules/technologies I should using/not using?

Any other tips or comments I can use?

Thank you for your help and support in this matter.

edit kudra 25-06-2002
Marked off topic