Xipwire Helps FOSS Projects Collect Donations for Free

by Lisa Hoover - Mar. 01, 2010Comments (0)

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Open source projects looking for an easy way to collect donations will want to check out Xipwire. It's a mobile pledging service that lets people donate to their charity or fundraiser of their choice. Ordinarily, the company charges users a small fee to process transactions, but Xipwire recently announced it will waive all fees for donations made to open source projects.

Currently, Xipwire directs donations to the Apache Software Foundation, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Free Software Foundation,GNOME Foundation, KDE, and Linux Foundation. If you have a FOSS project near and dear to your heart, drop Xipwire a line and they'll try to add it to the list.

To make a donation on your mobile device, send this text string to 56624 via SMS:

oss [-t foundation] [amount]

You'll receive a temporary username and password which you'll need to enter at the Web site to complete the transaction. You can donate up to $500, and 100% of the funds will be transferred to the organization within a few days.

Financial transactions on mobile phones are beginning to gain traction as a way to make money change hands easily. It's terrific to see a service like Xipwire take an interest in supporting FOSS projects and make it as easy as possible for them to collect donations.