[R] R Founding

[Marianne Promberger]

Hi,
 
> I would GLADLY donate 30-50$ each year just to see R develop, but there 
> needs to be a way for me to do it in a civilized manner. If the userbase of 
> R is over 2 million there will surely be 100,000 users who, like myself, 
> will happily fork out 40$ a year - would that help? you can do the 
> calculation yourselves. Set up a donation page in which I will be able to 
> pay by credit card or PayPal and you will start getting donations from 
> individual users. Advertise this at the startup message of the program: say 
> something like "support us at www.suppoRtR.com" and the money will start 
> coming. 

I think this is a great idea! (I emailed to the address on the R
page to that effect two days ago :) )

>From the other replies, it seems there are three broad groups of
obstacles:

(1) Figure out the way to do it -- PayPal would be best for
    international users, but there are now alternatives to PayPal such
    as Moneybookers, who might do the same thing for those who want to
    pay and might be better for the recipient -- I don't know.

(2) "What the money is used for"

(3) Convince the people who can make the decision, i.e. "the
    executives of the R foundation".

I think (2) is a fake problem. I for one would not care if the money I
donate is used for something I never use, or is even used
inefficiently. I gain so much from R from other people's work, I would
see my donation as a gift to them, and they could do with that gift
what they want to. They could go have lots of beer, for all I care
(unless it gets in the way of writing R, of course :) )

But one way around (3) might be even to have package developers accept
donations for packages.

Is there a way to take this off the r-help list to try to tackle this
as a "project"? Maybe set up a small Google Group?

Marianne

BTW after reading in this thread about the donation form and the
possbility to do IBAN, I went back to r-project.org and then found the
link how to donate. I had not seen this when I looked a few days
ago. You can say I'm stupid and didn't look hard enough, but from a
usability/ marketing perspective this means even this cumbersome
possibility is not salient enough at the moment.

-- 
Marianne Promberger PhD, King's College London
http://promberger.info
R version 2.11.1 (2010-05-31)
Ubuntu 9.04