Re: micro donations & payments -- GNU Herds tries to help its users

[Davi Leal]

> > John Sennesael wrote:
> > > It would be interesting if donators could sign up with an account and
> > > 'deposit' an undefined amount of money, then receive back credits to
> > > distribute among projects/pledges/whatever whenever they want to.
> > >
> > >
> > > The advantage of a system like this would be:
> > >
> > >  1) You can donate to multiple projects/pledges with only 1 paypal fee.
> > >
> > >  2) This would allow for micro-donations. People can donate $1 or less
> > >     to as many projects as they want. Since normally, a low donation
> > >     would be absorbed by paypal fees.


Antenore Gatta wrote:
> we should provide as much (but not too many) payment systems as possible, in
> fact there is not a good or bad system, forcing a payment method we will
> loose all the other potential donors.

I propose create a GNU Herds base "Merchant account" [1], to allow deposit 
money, near the entity (person or organization) who will manage the account; 
USA or Europe.

  [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_account

I propose choose the ING Direct bank [2] which offers:
    * No account minimum.
    * No inactivity fee!

  [2] http://ingdirect.com/


> So my proposal is to use:
>    1. PayPal
>       AlertPay
>    3. Donate via check or bank account money transfer

I propose GNU Herds support the above Antenore's proposed transfer methods.




> For the legal issues it depends on where will be the Gnu Herds head
> offices, we will need to do the statement of income, paying taxes and so
> on...
>
> In general we need a legal representative, someone that will represent Gnu
> Herds as a legal entity, in fact it's not possible to open a bank account
> without an owner, and him/her will be responsible of all the legal and
> money issues.
>
> If we will belong completely to the FSF we should speak with them on how to
> proceed.

We will send an email to RMS/FSF, but I am not sure they will support
such feature.

Maybe they do not have resources to realize it. They are already doing a lot 
for the project. Anyway we will ask them.