Dear SourceForge.net user,

We appreciate your interest in donating money to SourceForge.net. As you know, SourceForge.net provides hosting, completely free-of-charge, to more than 65,000 Open Source software development projects. These projects produce high quality software for you to download and use. To support this service offering, we maintain more than 80 dedicated servers, a full-time staff team and utilize a large amount of bandwidth each month. Despite the costs involved, we continue to provide these services without cost to the Open Source community, as we have done since our site was founded in 1999. Your contribution to SourceForge.net will help us to develop and expand our sizable service offering.

When you donate to SourceForge.net, you will have the option of including your name on our Supporters page, and to have a special icon () designating you as a donor wherever your name appears on the site. (You may opt-out of this special treatment at any time using the provided check-box on the Account Maintenance page.) We appreciate your donation.

Instructions and Frequently Asked Questions

This page includes information about how donations may be made, how the donated money will be used, and information about the public recognition you will receive (unless you opt-out) after making a donation. We appreciate your interest in contributing to SourceForge.net and want to make this experience one that you will feel good about. Please read the entirety of this page.

Table of Contents

How do I donate money to SourceForge.net?

At the bottom of this page, you are provided the opportunity to proceed in donating money to SourceForge.net. SourceForge.net accepts donations using PayPal. This process has the following steps:

1. At the bottom of this page, click on the button above the amount you want to donate. Go to the Donation Page (you are here, now), read the provided instructions and use one of the PayPal buttons at the bottom of the page select the size of the donation you want to make to SourceForge.net. Buttons are provided for common denominations of US$5, $10, $20, $50, $100 and $250.


2. Enter a comment if you want to appear on the Supporters page, then click the PayPal Donate button. After clicking on one of the denomination buttons, you will be offered the opportunity to verify that you have picked the desired denomination, and to enter a comment that will be attached to this donation. To proceed, click on the PayPal Donate button.


3. Enter your credit card information (or login to your PayPal account) on the PayPal page, then complete your donation. You will be redirected to PayPal where you may complete your donation either by following the provided instructions (you may either login to a PayPal account and make the donation, or enter your credit card information).


4. Track your donations to SourceForge.net. Once your donation has been submitted, PayPal will email you a receipt. The SourceForge.net site will recognize your donation within a week. A listing of donations you have made to SourceForge.net will also appear in the Donations section of the My SF.net page.

Why should I donate money to SourceForge.net?

Do you like the idea of community-developed Open Source software and want to support this type of activity? Are you doing research related to the Open Source projects hosted on SourceForge.net?

By donating money to SourceForge.net, you help us to continue to provide a strong service offering to Open Source projects and their end-users. SourceForge.net continues to grow at a significant rate, with large numbers of new users and projects joining the site each month. Through your financial contribution, you can help offset the expense of providing services to these projects, and fund our plans to expand the SourceForge.net site and service offering (including the redesign of a number of existing services to be more feature rich and user-friendly). A running log of our site improvements (updated weekly) is maintained by SourceForge.net staff.

I live outside the United States; can I still contribute money to SourceForge.net?

Yes, since SourceForge.net accepts donations through PayPal, we are able to accept contributions from many different countries (including the United States, Canada, Germany, Japan, China, United Kingdom, Denmark, and others). PayPal will handle the currency conversion on your behalf. Additional information regarding currency conversion will be provided by PayPal after you have reached step 3 in the donation process.

Is my donation tax-deductible?

To the best of our knowledge, no. In the United States, donations are only tax-deductible when they are made to non-profit organizations that are permitted to provide tax exemptions by the government (such as 501(c)3 charities). SourceForge.net is operated by Geeknet, Inc. and is not a charity (despite the fact that we provide services to Open Source projects free of charge). If you live outside the United States and you believe this donation may be tax-deductible, please consult local tax laws and/or a tax attorney; to the best of our knowledge, donations to SourceForge.net are not tax-deductible anywhere in the world.

I represent a company, organization or person that would like to donate at least US$1000 to SourceForge.net, but we don't want to use PayPal; can you help me?

If you are interested in providing a contribution of at least $1000 to SourceForge.net, please contact the SourceForge.net General Manager, Jay Seirmarco, at jseirmarco@users.sourceforge.net We welcome serious inquiries of this nature.

What do I get for my contribution? Do I get special attention on my support issues or say over what will be implemented next on the site?

SourceForge.net works hard to provide free-of-charge services to projects we host. Whether you are a developer on one of these projects, or using software developed on SourceForge.net, you are deriving benefit from our efforts. While we provide no specific bonuses for your contribution, you will have the happiness of knowing that you have helped to support the world's largest Open Source software development site.

We cannot guarantee that as a donor you would a higher level of support than we already provide, but may well take this in to account when processing your request. We accept feature requests from everyone, and do not guarantee a particular schedule for implementation of new features, but similarly we may take in to account features requested by donors.

How will my contribution be recognized?

We maintain a Supporters page (this is a publicly-accessible page) of donors and their comments. If you opted-out of display of your donation on the Supporters page, or if you were not logged-in when you made your donation, your name will not appear on that page.

You may remove your name from the Supporters page after-the-fact using the option provided (Donation Visibility) on the Account Maintenance page.

Now that SourceForge.net is accepting donations, can I put donation links for my project on my project web site (hosted on SourceForge.net)?

As of 2003-12-01, SourceForge.net permits projects to include links to the SourceForge.net Donation System (for their project and/or developers) after Opt-In for donation service has occurred. SourceForge.net prohibits the display of other types of donation links (i.e. those that do not use the SourceForge.net Donation System) or for using project web sites for the generation of revenue. These restrictions do not apply to project web sites (i.e. "Home Page" link on the Project Summary page) hosted external to SourceForge.net (our restrictions help control how our disk space, bandwidth, and other resources are used, but does not restrict the display of donation-related content on sites hosted elsewhere).

Are you living only on donations? Where does your money come from? Will SourceForge.net go away if I don't donate?

No, we ARE NOT enabling donations to try to "save the site". SourceForge.net is owned by Geeknet, Inc.. SourceForge.net is not in financial trouble, nor is it going away. Our parent company, if you read our quarterly financial statements, continues to show steady improvement. We are adding this donation feature because SourceForge.net is very expensive to operate and we want to add the features and functionality that we know you want. If you like what we are doing for your project; if you like what we are doing for the Open Source community, now you can make a donation and help us out.

I am having a problem using the donation system -- PayPal is not accepting my donation.

We recommend you check the online help provided by PayPal; if your issue persists, contact PayPal for assistance.

When reporting issues to PayPal, please reference: Source: sourceforge.net

I have a question about the donation system; where should I direct my question?

Questions, concerns, or SourceForge.net site issues related to the donation system may be directed to the SourceForge.net team by submitting a Donation Support Request.