Difference between revisions of "Donation/En"

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Despite what some may think, TuxFamily is a large, complicated platform which doesn't run on its own.  First and foremost, TuxFamily is a team which has heavily invested its time and talents into providing a quality service available to all. Each donation, no matter how small,  adds support for this project and spurs the team to continue.
 
Despite what some may think, TuxFamily is a large, complicated platform which doesn't run on its own.  First and foremost, TuxFamily is a team which has heavily invested its time and talents into providing a quality service available to all. Each donation, no matter how small,  adds support for this project and spurs the team to continue.
  
== How to Donate ==
+
== How to Give Back ==
 
=== Monetary gifts ===
 
=== Monetary gifts ===
 
* See on our main website  http://tuxfamily.org The "Make a donation" button can be used to make a donation
 
* See on our main website  http://tuxfamily.org The "Make a donation" button can be used to make a donation

Revision as of 15:22, 2 March 2008


Donations

Free as in Freedom does not imply free as in free beer, and like all Open Source organizations, TuxFamily.org has operating costs. Please consider what it would cost to host your project(s) on a non-Free site. Donations are purely voluntary and we appreciate any donation even small.

You can give either :

  • Your time
  • Your money

We are launching a donation campaign, since:

  • We anticipate needing approximately 5000 € to cover operating costs
  • Our bank account balance is 2000 € (but we used 4000 € in June 2007 when we had to add 5 new servers to keep growing... so it should be at -2000 € if our administrators didn't use their personal money...)
  • Operating costs are approximatively 5000 €/year to fix and upgrade the existing platform. It does not include the cost of any new servers

Our goal is to raise 7500 €, which should allow us to continue for another year (of course, more is always appreciated, we will be able to buy new stuff to provide new services...)

Why Donate and What For?

Lost Oasis, Free, Ikoula, Frontier Online kindly provide us with:

  • bandwidth
  • rack-space
  • electricity and air conditioning

but that does not cover everything. Maintaining the TuxFamily-owned computers is our responsibility, and that includes:

  • replacing failing hard-drives, buying replacement and spare hard drives, increasing storage capacity, improving backups.
  • replacing failing servers, adding new servers to handle new growth, or to handle new services.
  • See also our Equipment needs

Also, in addition to volunteering their time, several TuxFamily team members have lent us huge amount of money to keep TuxFamily up and running and to handle the cost of Free software related events.

These costs have included:

  • Transportation costs to represent TuxFamily at Free Software conventions (RMLL, Solutions GNU/Linux...) or to work on our foreign Servers (in Marseille for example).
  • Equipment costs for rack-servers and SCSI drives.

However please take note that the funds from the donation campaign will only go to the Association and not a penny will be used by the team members. The funds we raise won't go towards:

  • the personal computers of team members
  • paying team members for their time running Tuxfamily (replying to emails, handling spam infestations, providing user support, responding to requests for additional services, etc.)
  • paying for parties or personal meal costs at a convention.

By making a donation to TuxFamily, you can be sure that it will be used to promote Open Source in all of its forms (Free Art, Free Music, Free software, Free games,...) and that it will help small projects to raise and large projects to evolve.

Despite what some may think, TuxFamily is a large, complicated platform which doesn't run on its own. First and foremost, TuxFamily is a team which has heavily invested its time and talents into providing a quality service available to all. Each donation, no matter how small, adds support for this project and spurs the team to continue.

How to Give Back

Monetary gifts

Equipment

Volunteering

  • We are looking for people who want to promote the free software philosophy. As usual, there are several ways to help us :
  • For those who enjoy coding:
    • test http://vhffs.org and submit bugs, feature requests and patches.
    • write/translate the VHFFS documentation.
    • write VHFFS modules to provide new services (Trac, whatever).
    • manage some multi player games servers.
  • If you are familiar with open source licensing system or if you want to learn more about about it, we are also looking for moderators.
    • to evaluate hosting requests.
    • to check that hosted project follow our rules and to help them to promote their work.
    • to support the administrators in their tasks; to help them to find problems and to handle simple tasks that don't require a full administrator to resolve.
    • to answer to all the mails we receive.
    • Being a moderator is time-consuming and you have to be on the moderation channel to be aware of what is going on. Each moderation request doesn't take much time but all of them have to be taken care of expeditiously.
    • to work on this FAQ.
    • We also need people that can read and write different languages (e.g. English, Spanish, Italian, German...) to work on the internationalization of our hosting platform.
  • We are also looking for administrators we can trust.
    • This role has serious responsibilities: A complex hosting facility is running and you have to understand precisely how it works to be efficient when things go wrong. You will also be responsible for administrative tasks on the server. You can't just add or configure new services willy-nilly as you could with your own personal server. It is not that fun and it is the hardest job in the organization... You have been warned ;)
    • We will have to know you before giving you access to our hosting facility (start by being a moderator for example).
    • There are many tasks necessary to handle the growth of our community
    • That said, new people on the team provide it with fresh air and new ideas!

Don't wait! Take an active part in the life of your favorite host! Join us now! (and share the software, you'll be free, Hacker, you'll be FREE ! ;) )