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Mozilla The Internet Communications The Almighty Buck

The Dollar Campaign For Thunderbird Devs 49

Posted by timothy from the reasonable-is-an-understatement dept.
Robert Accettura writes "In a rather comical spirit, Seth Spitzer (of ex-Netscape fame) is asking Thunderbird users to donate one dollar (or about 0.77 if you're in Europe) to Scott and David, the lead engineers of Thunderbird. Unlike Firefox, with quite a large community submitting patches, Scott and David have been working with much less community aid, and still managed to deliver a very solid product. This is a little way to thank them for managing to do so much with so little to keep our inboxes free of spam and easy to use."
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The Dollar Campaign For Thunderbird Devs More

The Dollar Campaign For Thunderbird Devs

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  • Seriously, 0.77? 0.77 euro? Pounds? Swiss francs? Pounds of flesh? Last time I checked, the £-$ exchange rate was pushing $2 to the pound.

  • Snail mail addresses? (Score:5, Informative)

    by IO ERROR ( 128968 ) * <errorNO@SPAMioerror.us> on Tuesday December 21, 2004 @08:25PM (#11154359) Homepage Journal
    At the rates PayPal charges for credit card transactions [paypal.com] it would be cheaper for me to mail each of them a dollar bill.

    • Re:Snail mail addresses? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Jahf ( 21968 ) on Tuesday December 21, 2004 @09:04PM (#11154681) Journal
      But many people (like myself and another on this thread) use PayPal for a floating Ebay account. No cost to me (in fact, I make a little interest on it since I went for the investment account). Lets me drop the random dollar here and there pretty easily.

      I don't think anyone is going to find fault in not doing this if you don't already have a PayPal account.

      Honestly, though I did send my $1, I don't see this getting much attention as the "Developer" section on /. is about the most dead topic ... as noted by the whopping 12 or so responses after an hour or two.
      • Sure its free to send money. But if you're doing commercial transactions (and I suspect any account that receives a lot of payments gets classified as "commercial"), you have to pay a fee. Not bad, as credit card payments go, but not free either.
        • As far as I know, accounts are not automatically classified as commericial. According to the site "Personal accounts can send payments to and receive payments from, anyone with an email address. Business accounts can send and receive payments, and also accept credit card payments." I believe there are other benefits to a commercial account, such as automatic nightly deposits to a bank account, but if you don't need those features, you can stick with a personal account.
    • Do the math. First class postage costs 37 cents -- more if you're sending from outside the U.S. Add in the cost of the envelope, and nearly 1/3 of the total cost goes to transmission. That's many times what PayPal charges.

      If you want to send more money (and I'm not going to discourage you!) Snail Mail makes more sense. But not as much as you might think. You really need to use and check, and that imposes banking and handling costs on your recipient.

      • Hey, I got a bunch of free postage from stamps.com, may as well put it to good use.
      • That's many times what PayPal charges.

        Hm, but according to the Paypal fee schedule...

        1.9% + $0.30 USD to 2.9% + $0.30 USD ...sending $1 would cost $0.32-0.33 USD. That's almost the same as a postage stamp.

        Plus, if you sent via postal mail the recipient would actually get $1, but it would cost you $1 + 1 stamp. Through Paypal, it costs you nothing, but the recipient only gets about $0.68 USD.

        • .9% + $0.30 USD to 2.9% + $0.30 USD ...sending $1 would cost $0.32-0.33 USD. That's almost the same as a postage stamp.

          Plus, if you sent via postal mail the recipient would actually get $1, but it would cost you $1 + 1 stamp. Through Paypal, it costs you nothing, but the recipient only gets about $0.68 USD

          You do realize you could send $1.34, right?

          That would give the recipient either $1.00 or $1.01 and still save you $0.03, not even considering the cost of the envelope or the check itself.

          Hint:

  • Okay (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 21, 2004 @08:30PM (#11154412)
    Well, after the insane popularity of Firefox, i thought Thunderbird was going to recieve a similar reception with hundreds of programmers swarming to help write it.

    The team has done a great job.

    LET THE REVOLUTION BEGIN !

  • Credentials? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Bitsy Boffin ( 110334 ) on Tuesday December 21, 2004 @08:33PM (#11154436) Homepage
    Ok, so perhaps some of us know who this Seth is, and why we should trust him enough to actually send money to him to forward to the Tbird developers.

    But I'd wager most Thunderbird users don't, me included.

    The site has no links to information about Seth, his name is just a mailto: link

    The FAQ says:

    Q: Is this a scam?
    A: No. But if you don't trust me you could donate your dollar to the Mozilla Foundation. See http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/donate.html

    My advice - do just that, or get the developer's email addresses and donate direct to them through paypal. If you give money to random people on the web, well, more fool you.

    • Re:Credentials? (Score:3, Informative)

      by asa ( 33102 )
      Seth's a good guy. He was responsible for much of the Mozilla mail code that lives on in Thunderbird.

      You don't have to take my word for it, either. Google for Seth or look at Bonsai and Bugzilla over at the Mozilla project to see how much he's contributed over the years.

      --Asa

  • $US4.90 on its way (Score:3, Interesting)

    by loddington ( 263358 ) on Tuesday December 21, 2004 @08:53PM (#11154602) Homepage
    I have transferred the entire balance of my paypal account. All $4.90 of it.

    Thanks for the great work guys.

    Ps. can we have a button on the toolbar that launches your default browser (firefox)?
  • Coincidently, I just switched over to Thunderbird today. I would have paid more if the link allowed me to. I'll bet others would too.
  • Here's a mirror of the page.

    Mirror [accettura.com]

    Payments go through: sspitzer (@) sspitzer.org just as the original page (he's collecting for them).
  • With almost ten thousand [daemonology.net] people having used FreeBSD Update [daemonology.net] to download and install binary security patches, I certainly wouldn't mind getting $1 from each user. Right now I'm averaging around $0.1 per user -- most of which came from slashdot.jp readers who don't even use FreeBSD Update, and all of which went directly into buying new hardware for building the security updates.

    Then of course there's my binary diff [daemonology.net] tool, which is being used by somewhere upwards of a million people, thanks to Apple's decision

  • And if you don't have Paypal? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Twylite ( 234238 ) <twylite&crypt,co,za> on Wednesday December 22, 2004 @04:14AM (#11156746) Homepage

    Seriously, some of us don't have Paypal accounts, and can't get them. Paypal isn't available in all countries. It sucks. Any suggestions?

  • I'll donate more than one dollar when they fix the bug that doesn't allow IMAP accounts to auto-purge junk mail after so many days.. Anyone else have this problem? Or maybe I'll donate and then ask them about this?

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