I’ve been on the SquirrelMail project for quite some time now, and an administrator on the project for several years. One of the things that has always been an issue has donations. As there are multiple people that contribute to the project at varying levels at different times, we’ve never figured out a good way to handle donations. Other projects, such as MySQL, setup a foundation, and generate enough donations that they’re capable of supporting full time working developers. Whilst it’d definitely be cool to do that, we’re not there project wise. So recently Paul sent out a rather interesting option, and it hit the lists.
He gave the users the ability to donate to individual people on the project, as well as sign up for bounties. The copy of the announcement can be found here. The other option was bounties. This has been used on several open source projects before, and the idea is that people “sponsor” a project, bug, or target. There are already several listed, but we’re always looking for more ideas. So if you have some, submit an idea.