Sourceforge will allow projects to assign a real domain to their pages iirc.

At godaddy we can get a domain for like 8$ a year.

You shouldn't, and I'm not donating either. But people (one?) have wanted to donate in the past and we didn't have anywhere to hold the money so, as far as I know, we turned down the offer.

Donating meager funds to an ambiguous group is foolish and will just lead to counterproductive bickering. I think a better way to officially accept donations is for people who work on Allegro to put their realistic "wish lists" on the official site.* That way, the donor knows exactly to whom and for what his money is going. A potential donor might want to donate based on a person's country, contributions, or even the wish list itself. Now there cannot be any justified complaints, because the donor is giving his gift to whomever he wants to. The wish list might be like:

Person, Country (Contributions): Item1, Item2, $50 for Foo, etc...

And in my opinion, Allegro doesn't need a domain, commercial hosting, etc that is paid for by some donors. It's just something for people to play around on, and something that can easily be personally financed by the few who are interested in it. Once someone else is paying for something, then the accountability goes to hell. If the people who are using it pay for it, then there's actually incentive to make something useful.

^{* Obviously a contributor wouldn't be obliged to list anything, nor would his wish list have to have anything to do with Allegro or technology.}

That's not donation, that's cheap advertising.

Other projects are not relevant. If you found something useful to donate to, then good for you (and them).

If Allegro needed capital for a specific reason, then donations would be great. To me saying, "Ooh, someone wants to donate, so let's get a server just because we can" is akin to me saying I donated to Allegro by just burning a $100 bill. Also, collecting money for "future use" is not likely to attract many people because they don't know where it's going! And if it goes to something of a dubious connection to Allegro, then they will just be upset.

My wish list is no different than when you (TF) requested money for a hard drive for your wiki. That's what I'm talking about. That was a need that was Allegro related that people could directly fund. Had there just been a general Allegro fund, there would have been fights about whether or not you (TF) "deserved" the money or not. Someone who had donated money who didn't agree with the cause would have been upset, sent some flames, and maybe kill a little kitten.

You can call it what you want (donation, wish list, etc), but unless there is a list that people can specifically give money to, it will in my opinion either go to waste or cause problems. Allegro is a project that barely has enough organization to release a new version once every two years. There's no way we could manage funds in any responsible way.

I updated the "donation comments" at SF now, so for whoever donates it should be clear now that there indeed is no pressing need for Allegro to collect funds.

I also don't see a big problem about fights over the money

And it's certainly not the same as burning, unless donating to any OSS project would be.

I agree that you'd potentially lose out on people who wanted to randomly give money for no reason, but to combat that, just make sure the list is never empty! The bottom line is really that we don't want a person's money if they won't agree with the cause. Therefore, I think it's bad (in a moral sense) to not put up a list simply because we are afraid they won't like the causes. We need to be honest about what the money will be used for. If they don't like the causes and it scares them from donating, then that is good. [Update: Specifically stating that there is no pressing need is good.]

That said, if we really have nothing on the wish list, then we could easily set up a mailing list. Want to donate money? Sign up for the list to be notified of future needs. If we collect money randomly with no need, we are likely to waste it on stuff that isn't needed. Then when something useful comes up, we are out of luck.

I also think it's foolish to spend the money on recurring charges (hosting, etc) when we have no guarantee of any sort of stable donations.

Personally, I don't care - but I'm not naive enough to think it won't offend people. Perhaps nothing will come out of the offense, but it wouldn't be surprising to see people quit developing on Allegro because they think someone else is abusing the funds.

We'll hell, I need a bit more motivation to work on stuff sometimes. Specially if its tedious

Actually, I agree with Evert, a allegro dev meet would be a good idea, we could discuss the future, and work on the code to get something done for once.

Just posting to say, the final AllegroGL 0.4.0 is up at SF now. There should be no need to upgrade if the RC already was working.

The same way you'd determine how to spend any of the money: everyone fights and argues about it until nothing happens.

Regarding an Allegro meeting, people should just pay their own way or find a sponsor. That goes back to what I was getting at. Let the person paying decide who to sponsor. But you'd probably have to pick multiple locations, because it can get quite expensive to fly cross continent. It would cost around $600 for a single round trip ticket between Chicago and London.

Speaking of OSX, its handle of frameworks and datafiles is a little lacking.

namely setting the datafile name to #

datafile.set_filename("#");

Does not work. Allegro can't find the executable. Even if you chdir to Contents / Binary (or whatever the folder is, I've forgotten), it still can't find it.

Next best thing is to place data.dat into Contents/Resources and do

datafile.set_filename("Contents/Resources/data.dat");

But not supporting # is inconsistent with the docs.