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whitepaper



Whitepaper: Donating to Open Source Projects with Advertiser-funded Micropayments
Abstract

This short whitepaper discusses the use of the Pico-Pay micropayments gateway as a method for Open Source developers and development projects to offer a viable, friction-free donation mechanism to supporters.

Introduction

Free and Open Source software has seen a dramatic increase in popularity in the last few years, and projects and communities which develop the software underpinning Open Source's success have flourished.

Funding

As Open Source software has no licence fees attached, projects and individuals which develop Open Source software need alternative mechanisms to help fund on-going development.

There are plenty of users of quality Open Source software who would be happy to donate money to their favourite project(s). Some projects are able to offer credit-card payment facilities to those interested in donating, but this has a number of negatives.

Firstly, due to credit-card transaction costs, its not possible for users to donate only a few dollars. Secondly, many users dislike providing their credit card details across the Internet. Thirdly, many who would otherwise be happy to donate, would prefer to do so anonymously.

This is where we believe we can offer a viable solution.

The system we propose to provide these capabilities is called Pico-Pay. It's a technology we have constructed which performs the following functions:
  1. It allows Open Source project developers to introduce a donation (or 'tipping jar') mechanism for collecting very small payments (in the order of tens-of-cents,) which would not otherwise be feasible within current banking or credit card frameworks.
  2. It allows users of Open Source projects to donate money to the project/developers, thus recompensing them for their valued work, but without having to actually pay anything themselves.
  3. It allows this transaction to occur in a totally anonymous manner.


Pico-Pay achieves these functions by providing a web-hosted gateway, operated from a web-browser, which facilitates donation payments. It co-ordinates the funding of these payments through advertising revenues.

Users of Open Source software, upon electing to donate a pre-determined amount of money to a project are re-directed to a Pico-Pay gateway form, whereupon they are shown links to funding advertiser sites. These links will be arranged and shown through a category-match system, so that the consumers are shown links of much higher interest-correlation, and advertisers are afforded consumers who are far more likely to be interested in the advertiser's wares. The micropayment gateway will offer the list of links to the users in an equitably random manner, favouring no one advertiser over an other.

Beside each advertiser link is displayed an offer-price as well as a stay-duration. The user needs to select and click on enough advertiser sites to accumulate enough credits to cover the donation payment price, as requested by the Open Source project developers.

The advertisers gain in this model, as they get to specify both the payment they will contribute towards the transaction, as well as minimum amount of time that the consumer needs to stay at their site.


Using Pico-Pay

We relate the following process by which Open Source projects or developers, can begin to use the Pico-Pay technology.
  1. Firstly, you need to have an Open Source project which people are happily using, and likely to feel pre-disposed to donating towards your efforts.
  2. You need to have an existing publicly available web-site.
  3. You need to sign up for an account with Pico-Pay. Accounts are easy to create, and are totally free. Visit http://www.pico-pay.com/ for more information.
  4. You will need to add information about your Project (which is called the Content) into Pico-Pay. You must provide the following information: the name of your Project (Content Name), the web-site location (i.e. URL) of where you should place a 'Thank you for donating to this project' web-page, and the category in which your Project falls under (for example, Computer - Business,) and finally, the donation price (how much you want to get paid prior to the user being re-directed to the URL you have supplied as the 'Thank You' page.)
  5. The Pico-Pay system will then produce a link which you will need to paste back into your own web pages. You can indicate to users visiting your web-site that if they click on the link, and follow the instructions, they will be able to generate the donation you need to assist you in ongoing work on your Open Source project.
  6. You will need to provide Pico-Pay with enough banking information so that once a month, pending a minimum of US$50 transaction account balance, we can pay you your accumulated donations.

Advantages

The immediate advantages of this model are as follows:
From the Open Source project developers' perspective, there is now a way in which small but useful donations can be sought and received for their ongoing efforts.

As the donator does not have to actually pay for anything per-se, the likelihood of them donating to the Project is greatly increased.

Further, as the donator does not have to provide any personal or identifying information whatsoever during this transaction (they remain totally anonymous as individuals,) the likelihood of them donating is further increased.

As the viability of click-through advertising is substantially enhanced through the Pico-Pay minimum-stay model, it is envisaged that this will legitemise online advertising for many businesses, and attract an increase in overall advertising spend within this space over the coming years. This is good for the health of the Internet, helping usher more money into the online world, and hopefully into many Open Source projects.

Conclusion

We hope that through the adoption of this style of micropayments technology throughout the Internet, Open Source projects can increase their long-term viability and economic sustainability, provide more donation payment options to users, and more effective advertising for the marketing community.

The Pico-Pay project is located at: http://www.pico-pay.com/



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