I’m so excited. I’ve just pushed the last update to the current Friends of GNOME banner. We received donations worth 20000 USD to make GNOME more secure and privacy aware. It’s so awesome to see so many individuals donating to make GNOME better for them and ultimately for all of us.
We got 250 one-off payments and roughly 650 periodic payments from payment plans over the last 7 months. During that period, 52 payment plans were created with the average amount of 10 USD per month (the default setting). However, 51 plans were cancelled :-\ The one-off payments were worth 17600 USD and hence the average donation was about 70 USD.
Depending on how you do the math, the cost of taking the one-off donations was between 3.3% and 4.4%. I find that number surprisingly low, probably because I still can’t make sense out of PayPal’s fee structure. But there are probably some hidden fees that turn up once you actually want to do something with the money, i.e. have it wired somewhere.
A very big “Thank You” to all the donors who generously allow us to continue our mission to produce a Free Software desktop for everyone. You guys rock. Seriously.
The new GNOME board, which is already serving since the beginning of this month, will meet during GUADEC and probably call for bids some weeks later.
