Donation/En

From TuxFamilyFAQ
Revision as of 00:04, 25 February 2008 by CraftY (talk | contribs) (translating the end of the document)
Jump to navigationJump to search


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 Donate 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 Donate

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 :
    • translate / enhance this FAQ
    • Use this FAQ to promote free softwares in your own way
    • Take some time to answer to post on http://forum.tuxfamily.org and to help new users
    • Help us to welcome every one on our IRC channel irc://irc.tuxfamily.org#tuxfamily or #vhffs. We try to be as present as possible but we also have to sleep and work some time ;)
    • Subscribe to the "help" mailing list to share your knowledge of our hosting services and to help new users
    • You can also take a role in the Organization : This doesn't require any skills in mass hosting or Computer science. We need people to work on our "Communication" which is for now limited.
  • For those who enjoy coding
    • testhttp://vhffs.org and submit bugs, feature requests and patchs
    • write/translate the VHFFS documentation
    • write VHFFS modules to provide new services (Trac, whatever)
    • manage some multi player games servers
  • If you know the open source licensing system or if you want to learn about it, we are also looking for moderators
    • tp accept or refuse hosting requests
    • to work on this FAQ
    • to check that hosted project follow our rules and to help them to promote their work
    • to support the administrators in all their tasks, to help them to find problems and to handle some simple tasks that doesn't request the administrator grade to be solved.
    • 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 doesn't take much time but it have to be taken care of quite fast.
    • We also need people that can speak many languages (English, Spanish, Italian, German...) to work on the internationalization of our hosting platform.
  • We are also looking for administrators we can trust.
    • We will have to know you before giving you access to our hosting facility (start by being a moderator for example).
    • It is not a funny role : you won't add or configure new services as you can do it on your own server. A complex hosting facility is running and you have to understand precisely how it works to be efficient when you will have to fix it. You will also have to do administrative tasks on the server. It is not that fun and it is the hardest job in the organization... You have been warned ;)
    • There are many usual tasks to handle the grow of our community
    • New people in the team will give some fresh air and new ideas !


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