Re: Linking to non-free websites from gnome.org

[Magdalen Berns <m berns thismagpie com>]

If crowdfunding was a service that the GNOME foundation offered it's
members, I would be in favor of that. However, as it stands today, I
believe this would cause undue burden on the board.

It's hard to say without thrashing it out but I definitely think it's worth thrashing it out, otherwise it definitely wouldn't be possible. :D

With that said, I would have thought the treasurer and webmaster or two would be better placed to handle the administration of something like this rather than the board of directors themselves. There is no reason I can think of why managing something like that could not be delegated appropriately as lots of other initiatives seem to get done at GNOME. With that said, I don't personally know the details of the method GNOME used for groupon to comment on how that sort of thing might work as a repeated effort for more modest wee module fundraisers. But, let's say the repeated the code from that fundraiser to allow them accept donations for a hypothetical new project then all it really comes down to is the extra workload on the treasurer and figuring out what the law says about raising money to pay volunteers, which I am guessing has been done with once or twice already, since GNOME is a fairly large charity and although GNOME is a charity, I do not see a compelling reason why they could not reasonably take an appropriate $ dollar percentage % off the total raised. Like a sort of admin fee that could be set aside to cover the reasonable cost for the time of those members involved who did the work to do stuff like set up a fundraising page and the treasurer having to take on some additional work in managing GNOME's annual accounts. Many of GNOME's contributors members are already volunteers, perhaps they would welcome some extra cash, for the effort. In the longer run it could be one way to get around the evil _javascript_ issue but also the community would probably benefit from personally engaging with fundraising as a consistent "thing". I imagine something like this would yield infrastructure and help GNOME develop it's fundraising strategies and generate income from a more diverse range of sources, in the long run.

Additionally, I'm against a policy on external links based on their
_javascript_, full stop. (However, I'm willing to entertain a policy based
on other guidelines).

Why are you against the notion of a _javascript_ policy? What kind of other guidelines would you entertain?

Magdalen