Re: Donations to the PostgreSQL project using bitcoins

>
>> Speaking for the PGFR association, donations are not a primary source of
>> income for us and we don't have plans to develop it (we prefer focusing
>> on getting more members). Furthermore we already have 3 different ways
>> to accept payments (including paypal) and it's a lot of work to keep up
>> with everything, so we're currently trying to simplify it and handling
>> bitcoins does not seem simple at all :)
> Depends on your viewpoint:
> 1) Create a wallet
> 2) Post an address to receive payments
> 3) Exchange it for real money on existing platforms. Surely the blocking part...
>

No the tricky part is that when you're a non-profit organization you
need to provide a balance sheet and profit/loss report every year to
your members and possibly to the public administration if that's
required by the laws of your country.

Writing these documents (and the overall accounting work) requires a lot
of time and skills. And if you accept different currencies, basically
you need to do that work twice. Trust me I've done a lot of paperwork
and not-so-funny accounting work for the PGFR association and at some
point I wished I could have spend my time to some more direct and
ego-rewarding contributions :)

But most of all the main reason why I think it's not worth spending time
to get more money is precisely because PGFR association has much more
money than it can spend. Of course we're not refusing money, but what we
really need is more time and more members. We have a lot of great
projects that we can't launch. And money is not the problem.

I don't know the context of the other PostgreSQL non-profit organization
but I bet you'll find the same situation everywhere : If you find enough
time and people to organize an event or start a project about
PostgreSQL, most of the time the money will follow. We're very lucky, it
doesn't work like that for most of the non-profit associations I know !
But PostgreSQL is attracting so much interests and resources, that our
free time and our imagination seems to be our main limits :)