Donations to OpenSTV

The first release of OpenSTV (then pSTV) was October 20, 2003. Since the beginning, the web site has had a donation box. With the release of OpenSTV 1.5 this past March, I also included a donation request in the header of the election results. For anyone interested in the economics of open-source software, here is a summary of donations received.

From the website donation box, there have been two donations: $250 in December 2007 and $25 in February 2010. Both related to commercial use of OpenSTV. The first was a labor union in Canada, and the second was the popular Q&A site Stack Overflow.

In the last release of OpenSTV in March of this year, I included a suggestion at the top of the election results to donate $50. Over the past five months, there have been about 800 downloads of OpenSTV and four donations, respectively, of $50, $50, $50 and $5. I haven't done a statistical analysis, but it seems clear that putting the donation request in the election results increased the likelihood of getting a donation. One of the donors was the National Press Photographers Foundation, and I believe the other donations were from non-commercial uses, but I don't know for sure.

A number of very large organizations have used OpenSTV, e.g., large universities, but have not made donations. Cornell University even boasted in a newspaper article that using OpenSTV saved them $18,000 (likely only partly due to OpenSTV) but did not make a donation even though I sent an email asking for one.

In summary, you are more likely to get donations the more overtly you ask, but for a small open-source software project, it is hard to even get sufficient donations to cover web hosting costs.