Donations Explained

How Do I Donate?

The simplest and only official way is to use PayPal, so please click the PayPal "Donate" image in the left-side menu of the Rockbox site.

Who Receives The Money?

SolomonPeachy is our treasurer and he collects all the donated money.

What Happens With The Money?

We spend money from the donated funds on Rockbox-related activities, and in the past they have been:

• paying our infrastructure hosting bills
• buying broken hardware or hardware debugging tools for analysis/research
• buying functional players for volunteering hackers (to get Rockbox ports going or expanding the developer base)
• buying food and drinks during Rockbox events

Why Should I Donate?

Because you like Rockbox - what has been done so far and what might be done in the future. Because we have no backing from any manufacturer. Because you want to allow Rockbox to continue developing, to expand to further devices and to improve even more on the players it already runs on. Because you want a few of the Rockbox hackers to have a beer on your behalf as a proof of your appreciation. Because you get a lot of quality software made by people who spend precious spare time to write it - for no money at all.

Do I Need to Donate?

No. Really. Rockbox is done by volunteers and we'll continue doing Rockbox even without donations.

Bounties in exchange for features?

You might really want a feature added to Rockbox, or you might even want Rockbox to run on some piece of hardware that previously it didn't run on. You might believe that the best way to make this happen is to offer some money to make someone more likely to implement this thing you really want. There are a couple of problems with this though :

• First, the cost of developing a new rockbox feature is usually underestimated. Google has provided money to interested students in the form of a stipend while developing new features (codecs, new ports, GUI changes, etc). These are on the order of thousands of US dollars. Unless you are willing to pay a similar amount or larger, its probably not worth considering trying to hire someone.

• Second, how are you going to make payment of your bounty? If you make it in advance, there's no guarantee that the person who's agreed to do the work for you won't just disappear. If you promise to make payment after the feature is done, how does the person doing the work know that you're not going to renege on your payment?

For those two reasons, most users are probably not advised to try and offer a bounty. However, individuals or groups with the financial resources are welcome to contribute to rockbox however they like provided they follow the terms of the GPL and submit their code to normal review procedures.