Donations update and thanks!

By factoryjoe on 12 Jul 2005 at 21:01 UTC

On behalf of everyone who organized the fundraising, we want to extend a huge Thank You to everyone who donated and made this effort a monumental success!

In 48 hours, we managed to pull in just over $10,000 in mostly small donations from more than 250 generous folks. That's more than 300% of our intended goal -- an incredible feat for the Drupal community!

To maximize the benefit of your donations, we've partnered with the Open Source Lab at Oregon State University (thanks Scott and Corey!), and, in short order, have come up with a fantastic plan for the future infrasturcture of Drupal.org.

Already, we've had countless email exchanges and at least one meeting with the good folks from OSL; their help has been invaluable as we transition to bigger and better hardware and a more stable, staff-supported environment.

We have also decided to use all of the donations to improve Drupal's hardware and hosting infrastructure, rather than divide it up for other purposes. There are a number of reasons for this, but primary among them is opportunity. We've arranged for OSL to handle the purchases for us as part of the comprehensive plan that we'll be unveiling later this week and we think it's an exceptional arrangement for Drupal and OSL (you'll find out why soon enough!). This is a very important relationship for Drupal and one that will have a profound effect on Drupal's ability to scale over time.

Finally, we want to again thank our amazing donors and all the folks who made this possible, including Scott Kveton and Corey Shields from OSL, Steven Peck, Dries Buytaert, Chris Messina, Steven Wittens, Boris Mann and Jonathan Dillon. Thank you all!

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Comments

Thanks!

Dries commented 13 July 2005 at 08:49

Thanks to all of you who contributed!

I'd also like to say thanks to those who offered hardware, hosting or mirrors. I got at least 30 offers and I've not been able to get back to all of you yet.

As Chris Messina (factoryjoe) mentioned in the post, we'll follow up with details about the infrastructure plan (and an extra surprise) later this week.

Note that some names on the poster might be missing or incorrect. Chris has agreed to update the poster later on to correct inconsistencies. If that is the case, let us/him know.

Good to see that drupal is

huw commented 13 July 2005 at 11:05

Good to see that drupal is now back up. Looking forward to the surprise!

Huw.org.uk

I wanted to donate... but

pamphile commented 13 July 2005 at 13:54

I wanted to donate... but again, since only PayPal was accepted I could not. :(

http://01wholesale.com
http://01businesses.com

Click & Pledge

jsimonis commented 14 July 2005 at 08:09

Maybe Drupal should look at having Click & Pledge to do donations as well. The percentages are a bit higher than Paypal; however, when you're mainly dealing with small donations it works out to be about the same.

With Click & Pledge you can take credit cards as well as do invoices to where people pledge an amount and then get a receipt they can print out and mail in. We've found more people use Click & Pledge on our website than they do Paypal.

--
Jenni S.

FYI... Any major credit card can be used...

Scott commented 14 July 2005 at 21:20

...with the PayPal Donate button drupal.org uses. A PayPal account is not required.

only available in selected cinemas

bertboerland commented 15 July 2005 at 11:10

not in all countries it is, depending on your source ip it will show the credit card option
--
groets
bertb

--
groets
bert boerland

WAIT! You've left people off!

Steve Dondley commented 13 July 2005 at 12:03

I donated some money to the campaign but I wasn't included in the graphic. I checked my PayPal account and the status of the payment says:

"Uncleared (Expected Clearing Date: Jul. 13, 2005)"

And I made my payment within a few hours of the start of the donation campaign.

Please consider waiting a couple of more days until you make this poster for others who are in the same boat as me.

We'll wait long enough

Dries commented 13 July 2005 at 13:14

Chris has agreed to update the poster later on to correct inconsistencies. We'll wait long enough for payments to get cleared. I can check these in my Paypal account too. Sorry for the inconvenience/wait, nysus. We'll get your name on that poster!

My congratulations!

LeXuS commented 13 July 2005 at 12:15

It's a good news :-)

Saw my name!

imerlin commented 13 July 2005 at 14:30

Great! Looking forward in seeing how the money was spent, redundant servers would be awesome.

I also belive that my donation is well spent in Drupal. Tried alot of other CM systems like Mambo and Typo3 but so far Drupal is on top. Probably would've donated anyways even if the server didnt go down.

I just made my donation..

Lam0r commented 13 July 2005 at 16:11

Its great to see how generous people are here. Thanks to drupal I am running a great site.

I emailed Dries urging him not to invest into the Dual Xeon setup, AMD opteron based systems give more bangs per buck as you can see here http://tinyurl.com/7ao5e

Not necessarily

benshell commented 13 July 2005 at 16:48

A lot depends on what you're going to use them for. Besides, I think I read that the new servers have already been ordered.

Also, there is more to the

eas-1 commented 13 July 2005 at 21:39

Also, there is more to the cost of a server than the hardware. If OSL has standardized on Dell servers then there are advantages to using the same hardware they have standardized. Tech's will be familiar with their quirks, and they're more likely to have spare parts on hand.

Yes, that's right

jlambert commented 15 July 2005 at 01:10

That's exactly right.

The 1850s bought for Drupal have redundant servers already onsite at OSL, and we'll be able to share a backup server with another project. This is really cool, no?

Also, Opteron boxes really are great, and the Sun db box uses duals, but the price point of the Dell XEON servers is also pretty good.

Nice link though. That was cool.

--------------------------------------------------
FireBright :: http://www.FireBright.com/

Glad drupal.org is back up!

Dave Cohen commented 13 July 2005 at 18:09

Glad the site's back up, and glad to see my name on the poster. Nice idea.

This means good things for Drupal in the future.

-Dave Cohen-

Wow!

cel4145 commented 13 July 2005 at 18:35

That should be enough for a nice server configuration. No more bandwidth or usage overloading the server :)

Thanks back

Schamess commented 13 July 2005 at 20:43

It's all of the folks who work so hard on the code that deserve the thanks. The contributions are just a small measure of how grateful many of us are for your efforts and for the great software you have created.

Andrew Schamess

Agreed

imerlin commented 14 July 2005 at 10:35

This is yet the most sensible framework I've seen in an open source CMS + the code is clean.

The developers of Drupal deserve our thanks, just hope that the donations show indication of a strong community growing.

good move spending all $$ on hosting & infrastructure

MeanDean commented 15 July 2005 at 03:49

We have also decided to use all of the donations to improve Drupal's hardware and hosting infrastructure ...

Good move! Seriously.

It immediately puts to rest any entanglements, claims and/or bickering over money for various projects.
The expenditures are immediately visible and can be easily audited if need be
If excess funds are escrowed specifically for hosting, it insures a long stable home for Drupal
It allows drupal to host all of the development aspects (e.g. version control) as well as the community

Excellent!