Donation

[KevinVo]

To Coppermine Team.
I am planning to use your Coppermine Gallery script in my adult commercial forum. This is a great script.
So I just want to ask you 2 questions.
1/ Is it legal to use in adult commercial site?
2/ If it yes, how can I make a donation to Coppermine to show my appreciation?
That would be all. Thanks and wish you guys have a great time.
Kevin

[ecto]

About the donating question, read at the end of this thread:
http://forum.coppermine-gallery.net/index.php?topic=14227.0

[KevinVo]

Donate
The creator of the original (first) version of coppermine, Gregory Demar, has often been asked if he accepted donations from users who wanted to give something back for the free software had created. He turned donations down and asked people to donate to local charity instead. If you have no idea where to donate, you might consider to paypal some money to our webhost Sourceforge, who hosts coppermine as well as thousands of other open source projects. The coppermine project itself does not accept donations.

What? Is he rich or something? Well, Gotta let you know that I usually do a lot of donations to local charity. But I will be happy like others in here if Coppermine accepts donations from us.
Best Regards.

[ecto]

Do one have to be rich to rather see that people donate to charity instead of to oneself?

It's great that you donate to charity! If more people in this world donated just a small amount, a lot of people would be alot more happy, and we'd all live in a better world.

If you'd like to make the Coppermine community and dev team members even more happy, you could donate some to Sourceforge, or some more to your local charity.

[kegobeer]

The Coppermine team does not accept donations.

You can use Coppermine for whatever you want.  We're not responsible for the content on your site.

[Tarique Sani]

What? Is he rich or something?

Yes!

[Joachim Müller]

hehe, this is indeed a good question. Actually, some coppermine devs might be rich, some might be poor. However, we spend our time working on the project without getting paid, so the question about the devs' financial status just doesn't apply. It's a hobby (you might consider it some kind of "work for the community", even call it "charity work"). Not only the coppermine devs are doing this, but thousands of other volunteers - this is what you call OpenSource movement. OpenSource software can both be used by home users as well as commercial users. A well known example is the free operating system Linux: both volunteer (unpaid) developers as well as companies contribute to the development of various flavors of Linux and apps that are based on it. Some flavors of Linux come completely without charge, others charge for the package (they usually come with additional extras like a printed manual, premium support). There's a great variety of licences that OpenSource software is being released under. These licences determine how an OpenSource package may be used, modified and published. Coppermine is being released under the license "GNU GPL" that basically says that you're free to use and modify the software, you're even allowed to sell modified packages; however, you have to release all resulting work under GNU GPL again and make the source code of the app available to everyone.
The GNU GPL licence would allow the coppermine developers to accept donations, but we agreed that we wanted to stay financially independent - all of us have regular paying jobs, coppermine is just our "pet project". If the costs (e.g. for webhosting) might increase one day over a certain amount, we might change this policy and decide to accept donations to raise funds for maintaining the site.
The only thing we ask from users is that the "Powered by Coppermine" tag stays visible on your site. The reason is that we'd like to give others, who come across your site and like your gallery, the chance to get their own coppermine for use on their own site.
It's great to hear that coppermine users appreciate our work and are even ready to donate money - thanks for your readiness to pay for Coppermine.

Joachim