PayPal has always been a problem for us. There are lots of reasons, why people refuse to use it.
- PayPal has closed many accounts for doubtable reasons. There have been artists, activists and Open Source projects, which never got access to the money in their accounts.
- PayPal is not a proper bank – although many users have been mislead by their appearance. This wouldn’t be a problem, but as we have seen, you cannot force them to give you your money.
Those above, are just some general concerns people (including me) have. Despite the “trouble” there is with PayPal, there are many advantages:
- PayPal makes paying easy. No matter where you live, you can use PayPal from almost anywhere in the world.
- PayPal makes paying cheap. The fees are small and depend on the amount of money you transfer. A normal bank transfer may be much more expensive – depending on where you live.
What’s the problem for the IPFire project?
Well, you may think that we are not really connected with PayPal. What do we bother? In fact, the success of the project depends completely on PayPal.
Why is that? The IPFire project is completely funded by donations. Indeed, it is an Open Source project, but that does not mean that there is no money involved. The bills we have to pay are for example the hosting infrastructure, which is quite huge for this project. Sometimes we need to buy hardware to port IPFire to this hardware. Those are just a few things for which money is needed.
You, the community, provides us this money, because of course you enjoy what we are doing. Most of you are using IPFire in their companies and you are able to save a lot of money because you don’t have to buy a commercial solution. For that, a lot of you send us a small thank you in return.
We got asked a lot if there is a way to show appreciation without using PayPal, because of the reasons above, people just don’t want to use it. And we have always searched for an other similar service. As far as we know, there is none which is more feasible than PayPal.
Therefore, we decided to create a bank account on which you can donate money. Even standing orders, which has also been requested several times. This makes the project independent from PayPal and is a way to make donations, which will a more of you use without doubting the financial institute behind it.
All the details you need are available on the donations page. Please, consider donation or suggest donating to your manager, to keep this project vital. We appreciate it very very much.