Archived News

Donations

As you might have noticed we have not had a fundraiser these last couple of years. The reason for this is that the donations have increased significantly, especially since the release of the 1.0 series. This means that we have enough donations to pay for our server, which runs the compile farm and hosts the website, for the coming 30 months (paid in advance yearly contract that ends in June). We thank you for all of these donations.

Thus we have some extra money to spend. We have thought about using the money to buy mobile phones for some developers to get a mobile version of OpenTTD started, but none of the developers are interested in that. Also buying Apple hardware to revamp the Mac OS X port has no benefit when no developer, besides planetmaker who already owns a Mac, is interested in maintaining that port.

We finally decided to donate some money to two "projects" that we think have been and still are very important to OpenTTD. First there is the forum graciously hosted by Owen Rudge. The forum hosts the most used first line of interactive support, as well as threads for many of the NewGRFs, AIs, suggestions and patches developed over time. Secondly there is the devzone of #openttdcoop. The devzone hosts the development of OpenGFX, OpenSFX and OpenMSX which are vital for bringing OpenTTD to the big public. It furthermore hosts the development of GRFCodec, NFORenum and NML which are needed for the development of OpenGFX as well as many other NewGRFs.

Although we could start offering these services ourselves, it would mean putting all eggs into one basket of the OpenTTD servers, making it a big single point of failure. Additionally, both the forum and the devzone are vital parts of the OpenTTD community and provide for a lot more than just support for the official OpenTTD versions and rely on donations just as OpenTTD does. Taking over the "official" tasks would only result in duplication of servers and infrastructure, leading to wasted donations. As such, we think it to be prudent to support and thank them for their efforts by donating £200 each to help cover a share of their hosting costs.

We feel this is warranted as many people donating to OpenTTD have no idea that the forums or the development of OpenGFX, OpenSFX and OpenMSX are hosted by third parties and may not realize their donation does not support them, even if they intended otherwise.