Regarding the AbiFund

Hello all,

Many of you know that I've been having trouble with managing the
AbiFund for a little while now. During the past few months, we've
apparently been receiving payments from stolen credit cards, usually
in the amount of $5. In many cases, the card holder (or their credit
card's issuing company) has initiated chargebacks against us, meaning
that they want a refund of their money. This is fine by me - I don't
want to be in possession of stolen money.

The chargeback procedure is nearly completely opaque to me - I don't
get to see why the money is being refunded or what the specific
complaint is. So the causes for the chargebacks are (I suppose) just
speculation. As you can imagine, this is extremely frustrating and
time-consuming. Worse still, the latest chargeback came with a $10
fee. So we're not even at a break-even point with these fraudulent
donations (valuing my time at $0), but it's costing us money to accept
them.

I have no idea if this affects my credit score or my eBay/Paypal
seller rating. I have no idea what sort of sick fsck steals credit
cards and makes small donations to volunteer-run F/OSS projects, in
order to have them be charged a $10 processing fee. You're not Robin
Hood. Whoever you are, I sincerely hope that you choke on a bucket
full of cocks.

I was ok with Paypal charging us a little fee for using their service.
We even earned a few dollars in interest from their Money Market fund,
which almost covered the cost of their service fees. However, I am not
ok with Paypal charging me a $10 fee plus my time to deal with stolen
credit cards. But even though the resolution process is perhaps
unnecessarily cumbersome, it's ultimately not Paypal who is reaming
us, and so I feel a little sorry for them too, as well as those folks
whose card numbers were stolen. So I can't be too mad at them.

In light of all this, I feel that I have no decision other than to
stop accepting donations on behalf of AbiWord and intend to close my
account as soon as practicable. Today, the fund's balance stands at
roughly $2300USD. We need to figure out what we should do with this
money. Some open questions include:

* Does anyone want to manage the fund, in light of all this? Maybe
using a different service than PayPal?
* Should we "donate" this money to Marc and Martin's company, AbiSource, BV?
* Should we give this money to some of the core developers?
* Should we use it to purchase hardware? (do we need any?)
* Should we sponsor some projects that don't get accepted to GSoC?
* Should we donate it to some worthy non-profit? Feed the
children/breast cancer/whatever
* Etc.

I would like to hear from at least the core developers ASAP (Tomas,
Marc, Martin, Robsta, Hub, Sum1). And if anyone else has a suggestion
for how to proceed, I appreciate your feedback.

Best regards,
Dom

-- 
Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly
recognizes genius.