[ikravets]

Thanks a lot that using PlatformIO for that long period.

We are from Ukraine and do legal business. PayPal is not allowed in our Ukraine :(

The other option is SWIFT, however I'm not sure that it makes sense with donation. In other cases, please contact with us http://platformio.org/#!/contact. I hope we will find solution in this situation.

[StavrosK]

Hey Ivan! You can easily add Bitcoin payment options though various providers (maybe stripe too?), which may be a handy way to donate.

[ikravets]

What do you think about https://salt.bountysource.com/teams/platformio ?

The all information about donations will be public for our community and it is important for us! We will decide together how to use these donations.

The first need is to move all PlatformIO Packages (toolchains, tools, frameworks, etc) from free and UNRELIABLE SourceForge.Net to something more reliable (Bintray, Google Cloud, etc).

[StavrosK]

Looks great, donated, thanks!

[ikravets]

Thank you too that supported us!

[melted]

Bitcoin would work great too.

[ikravets]

Are you sure that it will be understandable for donors?

[melted]

Pretty sure. Many open source projects accept Bitcoin. The concern for you is whether you'll be able to turn it into cash in Ukraine. And don't offer it as the only option - even among techies Bitcoin is not that huge.

In general, though, by far the best option is just plain PayPal without intermediaries. The less friction you have, the more money you will collect. The thing about PayPal is most people already have accounts. Signing up for something else is friction. Providing financial information to a foreign web site is a complete non-starter. International SWIFT requires a trip to the bank, and a substantial fee, so it won't work either.

Also, I think it's a mistake to not offer commercial support contracts. Basically here's how you could "freemium" this: offer no SLA for non-paying users, offer guaranteed turnaround to paying customers (don't be overly aggressive - a couple of business days is fine). Encourage commercial users to purchase support. Encourage non-paying users to donate (like Ubuntu, I did donate to them several times). I don't know if you have much commercial usage at this point, but if you do, this might create a recurring revenue stream which will keep you afloat. Or get in touch with someone in Silicon Valley and work out a business plan. What you have right now is by far the best IoT development platform available. It might be not clear to someone without business skill how to make money with it, but I'm sure it can be done.

[ikravets]

> The less friction you have, the more money you will collect.

We have started to use BountySource https://salt.bountysource.com/checkout/amount?team=platformi.... They accept PayPal, Bitcoin and etc.

> offer no SLA for non-paying users, offer guaranteed turnaround to paying customers (don't be overly aggressive - a couple of business days is fine).

The problem here is that I love very much to help people not matter where do they live and that they don't pay me. I don't have aim to earn millions from PlatformIO. I was not embedded developer before, I'm Web-developer in the past. PlatformIO is solution for the problems with which I ran into a few years ago ( http://www.ikravets.com/computer-life/programming/2014/06/17... ). I just like this idea with PlatformIO and I live with it 24hours per day (very often I wake up in the middle of the night and think how to improve further things).

The most users of PlatformIO are not electronics engineers. Embedded and IoT are the hobby for that people. They also have great ideas how to improve Embedded World, automate some home process or just make first blink program without C/C++ skills. I'm teacher in soul and I'll apply maximum efforts to help each PlatformIO's user to make first steps with embedded programming.

------

Please do not think that I'm crazy. Of course, I have PlatformIO Team and each of us have family and the necessities of life. We are not going to work for free whole life on the PlatformIO. I'm trying to enter into cooperation with the famous vendors and companies. My request is related to "help us with supporting PlatformIO in FREE model for ALL", but not to "give us the money because we will not add support for you hardware/software".

Users buy hardware from the vendors and use PlatformIO. That is great! We are ready to help hardware vendors save time on the software development.

Regards, Ivan Kravets

- CTO, Founder, Ph.D, Researcher and System Architect at PlatformIO.Org

[kordless]

I've tried using this on and off for a few days and have run into all sorts of issues just trying to get the blink program uploaded to an Arduino. The documentation and issues on Github aren't particularly helpful, either.

[ikravets]

* Which problems have you had?

* What do you recommend to improve us?

Thanks.

[kordless]

A troubleshooting FAQ, if possible. I'll hop in Gitter and try to work the issue I'm having.

Note: I jumped on Gitter and talked to Ivan about this. Turns out that the project needs to be specifically broken down into /lib and /src directories. I had several interdependent libs that I had to move into their own directories inside /lib.

Thanks!