I've heard the name ChipIn (http://www.chipin.com/) tossed around a few times in relation to developing on a donation basis, and I'm wondering how it works out for developers, users and the community.
Yes. It is a great way of coordinating a "community fund"-alike thing. For example, see http://drupal.org/project/wysiwyg. I even asked in #drupal whether I can (should) write a patch for drupalorg.module that would add a ChipIn inline (macro) filter, so every project maintainer was able add a ChipIn widget on their project pages if needed.
It would be great if I could fix bugs for free but use donation drives to sponsor new features. That would probably be better than selling customizations directly, because it is less expensive to individual customers. Do you have any suggestions or criticism on this idea? :)
Having worked with some Drupal projects that badly need some community funding, I can see both the need AND the false assumptions of associated fundings. As long as we are not talking about scheduled events like the d.o redesign sprints that are - in their nature - ultimative, a community fund for a contributed module always means that any contribution to it only speeds up the actual, ongoing process. However, financial contributions to a fund do (and can) not guarantee that something will be done in the end. In this regard, FOSS and funding are not exclusive. But, if you consider to get some funding from the community (i.e. users of your module), then you should not rely on it. I had to deal with maintainers on drupal.org who made me think that they deferred all improvements to their modules until the next big "sponsor" hit the issue queue. That is certainly not the way it works. So if you want to setup a ChipIn, then do it rather by-the-way, please. It means that you ask the community to help you getting things done, but it does not imply that nothing will be done if no one contributes. Anything else would hurt the Drupal community, and Drupal's world domination after all. The more Drupal's user-base and our community grows the more I think we need a "proper" process of dealing with this issue. I separated those two audiences on purpose, since I believe that we will never be able to turn everyone into a "real" community member. To keep it short and to the point: donorge.org (Warning: Spam site now), which was capable to funnel a custom amount of all contributions to one project (f.e. the Drupal Association), looked very promising. I think that we need something like that to allow for "modularized" donations - following Drupal's nature. sun