Some thoughts about Donations

[goedl]

Since 2 years I'm using Rockbox on my iRiver H120 (mainly for recording) and on an iPod nano (almost every day).

I'm extremly pleased and have unfortunately much too less time for contributing work to the project and so I decided to make another donation. I have no idea how important the donations are for the project but in case anybody cares I have just some thoughs:

1) From time to time a feedback what happened with the donations would be nice (and maybe would encourage others to donate)
2) After making a donation a short "Donation received" mail would improve the warm and fuzzy feeling

I would love to support the development of newer ports but I understand that I can not dedicate my donations to a specific feature or port (and I'm aware of the almost hopeless expectations that the newer iPods will ever be supported). I just found the following statement from badger from an older thread and hope both mentioned purposes are well balanced.

Allow me to also remind people that we are using the donations mainly to buy hardware for more/new ports and to pay for developer-related activities

Thanks to all developers for their work. For me no commercialy available DAP comes close to the usefulness of a "rockboxed" device. And I hope this stays also for newer devices.

[AlexP]

I'm not the person to action any of these requests, but in lieu of an e-mail may I say thanks very much for the donation, and I'm glad you are enjoying Rockbox

[ouaybe]

Hi,
I'm using Rockbox on a Sandisk Sansa e2xx since maybe 2 years, and I also offered a Sansa c2xx because Rockbox could be used on this last device. So, although I don't have a lot of money to spend, I would like to make a donation via Paypal to the Rockbox project. How could I know what is the average donation, please ?
Thanks for this extraordinary project!

[AlexP]

I don't think there really is one - absolutely anything you would like to give would be very gratefully received - please feel no obligation whatsoever, and thank you for your very kind words.

[Bagder]

Over the years, most of the donations have been spent on two things: A) paying for hardware to developers and B) refunding expenses at developers conferences.

The A) involves buying hardware to developers to let them have a go at them or even replace hardware they've bricked while trying to work on Rockbox-related development on them. We also occasionally pay for HW equipment used for debugging, analyzing or reverse engineering existing players. Such equipment are then used by suitable Rockbox developers.

The B) part is mainly at our devcons where we try to gather as many Rockbox hackers as possible at one spot at the same time and then we try to reduce the economic hit people take by paying for parts of their travel and living expenses.

If anyone has (other) ideas on how to spend the money, we'll listen.

We are deeply grateful and appreciative of every single little cent donated to us. We are not depending on the donations and nobody should feel obliged or forced to donate anything. We work on Rockbox for the fun of it, but I think the donations received so far has helped Rockbox to reach the point we are today.