in reply to Re: On 'Donations Gladly Accepted'
in thread On 'Donations Gladly Accepted'

There is nothing for me not to agree with. I am not against IPOs, although I have never bought one.

Furthermore, I trust Vroom and I am grateful for the unpaid work he does so we can learn more Perl. I also understand that he doesn't wish to spend umpteen hundreds on a lawyer.

Much as I love this site, I am going to have to pass on contributing at this time because mixing charitable contributions with nominally for-profit ownership is dangerous.

It was a different situation entirely because Vroom is honest, but do you remember the guy who posted here a few months ago? Some sharpie conned him into working for free on some free version of a Napster-like site. Once the site was up and running, however, it became a for-profit site.

We all expressed sympathy for the guy and said that it was a lesson learned for all of us. Because my intuition and judgement tells me that Vroom is completely on the level doesn't mean that I should break a rule that helps keep me out of trouble.

I don't want to appear ungrateful. Those who feel differently than I do should contribute, and I will be glad if they do. But I cannot because it is a nominally for-profit site.

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Re3: On 'Donations Gladly Accepted'
by pmas (Hermit) on Jul 03, 2001 at 01:23 UTC
    Thank you sierrathedog04 for expressing your opinion. I do not agree with you, but I ++ you for expressing it.

    I think "charitable contribution" should not fool us. Somebody needs to pay for bandwidth - and recently we have more users, and site is becoming slower. So if we do not contribute, site will get even more slower, and maybe even worse.

    I do not see any problems with concept if vroom or somebody else is making profit from this site. But I seriously doubt anybody is making much of profit. :(

    See rumors on Tye's article (tye)Re: On 'Donations Gladly Accepted'.

    I do not want to bother to establish PayPal account just for Perl Monks, so I cannot offer this way.

    Is for you, sierrathedog04 so important that Perl Monks will be established as legal charity to you can deduct your X dollars contributed from your taxes? I do not plan to contribute so much that it will make financial sense to bother with this either, I'll better spend one hour more learning Perl better - became better expert in my craft.

    For me, this is like fund raiser for Public Radio: you decide to sent contribution, because you enjoy information provided.

    Consider how much you spent monthly on daily newspapers - and I doubt newspapers are more important for maintaining your income-generating skills, that PM site is. So why be so cheap? Why pretend that PM site is not "clean" enough to accept my couple dollars?

    If I want just to send personal check for say $20, where I should send it? Are there any dangers with that (I am new in USA - please warn me if there are some)?

    pmas

    To make errors is human. But to make million errors per second, you need a computer.

[reply]
      Actually, not-for-profit status does not mean charitable, at least in the USA. Many political lobbying groups for example are not-for-profit but contributions are not deductible.

      Vroom knows what he is doing and I trust him, but Tye's article makes it clear that if someone other than Vroom were in charge donors would have cause for concern. Apparently none of the donations go to Vroom. He is unpaid if he receives donations, and unpaid if he does not.

      Apparently the web host keeps all ad revenues from the site and all donations. I trust them too. I mean that ad revenues and donations probably do not cover the marginal expense of hosting the site.

      But I learned long ago that I am a fool, and I developed certain rules to protect myself. When I am downtown I will not answer to any male stranger who speaks to me, because no matter how convincing the shpiel is I am dealing with a scam 99 percent of the time.

      Not giving money to nominally for-profit organizations is simply another rule that I have.

      I think I have said what I needed to say. Helpfully, constructively I hope. They say that nothing is difficult for the person who does not have to do it himself. However, if there is any way that Vroom can transfer this Perl Monks to a not-for-profit status then I think it will be better able to make its already strong case for contributions from its users.

[reply]
        Right, in this case there just are not enough $$ going in here to be concerned.

        If there is a reason to get non-profit status or some such, it would be to protect Vroom, et.al. Eg, simply to have a non-taxable account for the money to go into. On the other hand, maybe we're all just paying bits of the ISP bill directly.

          p

[reply]

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