Gnucash Foundation

[Christian Stimming]

Reinke Bonte wrote:

>>Would you be able to use the www.c2it.com service?  I believe that
>>the GnuCash Foundation would be able to receive funds there.  I do
>>not know if there would be fees to you to send money.  
> 
> I have checked their website, but I have found no way to transmit money
> with this service from outside the US. This is all about sending money
> from the US to somewhere.
> 
> I don't find this service particularly cheap. For international
> transactions, you have to pay at least $10 per transaction, that is
> almost the same as the standard rate of my bank, and my bank gives me a
> much better exchange rate. The spread of the c2it service exchange rate
> is five times as big as that of my bank (and I think of most other banks
> here).


Yes, I agree with Reinke about that this service is quite expensive.


> Has anybody tried to send international transactions with an account at
> the postal office. A transfer of any amount up to 12,500 euro from a
> German postal office account to a Japanese postal office account costs
> exactly 0.50 euro. I don't know whether there is a postal bank system in
> the US.
> 
> Anyway, I think it is probably best to have one responsible person per
> region or give up the tip jar idea.

No, nobody has to "give up" the tip jar idea. It just turns out that 
finding an international solution is more difficult than it initially 
occurred.

IMHO we should simply say that electronical methods for donating money 
can only be provided within the US. Money transfers from/to non-US 
countries should simply be done as cash in a letter, if at all. [With 
the exception that some non-US countries have their own well-working 
bank system where transferring of small amounts of money works quite 
well -- e.g. if there are German users out there who want to give a tip 
to a German developer, the developer would simply give them his bank 
account number (recall that this is *not* a privacy risk in the German 
bank system) and they make a bank transfer to his account.]

Anyway. In cbbrowne's proposed Gift exchange registry 
http://www.ntlug.org/~cbbrowne/fssp.html this would already be 
represented through the fact that a gift is given from one person to 
another person personally. The technical detail of how the amount is 
transferred is thus independent of the act of giving, and can be freely 
negotiated between the receiving person and the sending person. And each 
receiving person can easily name a number of different ways for sending 
money to him that work well.

Therefore I still support cbbrowne's approach, which means that we do 
*not* set up one central tip jar for the gnucash project where some 
agency/whatever then distributes these tips back to the developers. 
Instead the distribution of tips between developers is already done by 
each patron him/herself, but cbbrowne's central Gift Exchange Registry 
helps everyone to keep track of who contributes anything and who 
recieves anything.

Christian