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:
- 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.
- 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.
- "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
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