DonationCoder.com
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Donationcoder.com is a website hosting a community of programmers and software fanatics. It supports a donation-based model to organize and finance software development, and is one of the few successful examples of Donationware.
The community develops and finances its own free software, software reviews, podcasts, and a diverse programming school. Funding is accomplished using a grant-like system of micro-donations. All donators to the site receive a portion of their donation back which they can then trade amongst themselves to support different projects and reward activities contributing to the community. All members are considered equal and simply donate an amount they feel comfortable with.
The community also fosters collaboration on free services, programming contests, and academic projects, such as a recent set of pages demonstrating the use of Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods to predict the winner of the World Cup.
The site has an active forum which focuses on developments in software, with an emphasis on ethical issues in the software marketplace, and a Programming School section which features challenges in a variety of languages and helps motivate people to teach themselves how to program (or learn a new language) and share their creations with others. Users can comment on each others code as they progress through the school.
Most of the software developed on the site is for Windows, though there are several large cross-platform open source software projects there as well.
[edit] See also
[edit] External references
Donationcoder programming school forum
Long Donationcoder article describing the idea of this website: "Experiments with Donationware: Ethical Software, Work Equalization, Temporary Licenses, Collective Bargaining, and Microdonations"
