As jMonkeyEngine continues its transition into the next stages of it’s online presence, we unfortunately come to the situation of monetary support, what it means, and how it’s used.
For a large portion of jMonkey’s life many of the online technologies used have been obtained via sponsorship agreements with large companies, some of which are freely available to everyone and some of which require criterea to be obtained. For the past 3 years Digital Ocean have been sponsoring our server with their open-source sponsorship program, and with careful and considered decisions, has allowed jMonkey to operate virtually cost-free for the duration of that time. Unfortunately that sponsorship program has now ended and Digital Ocean is not willing to consider us for another term in their program, and jMonkeyEngine is now in the situation of supporting itself financially in order to continue to provide the online services we have become used to.
In light of this change of events we are branching into Patreon dontations to not only maintain our existing presence, but improve upon it.
Patreon is a global crowd-funding platform that allows users to pledge their support to jMonkeyEngine and help drive the engine forward. All funding received from Patreon is used entirely for the improvement of jMonkey and will allow us to:
Pay for hosting of some web services (community hub, software store, etc).
Improve the existing software store to allow buying/selling software.
Implement a feature/bug bounty system to speed up the improvement of the engine.
With your support we will have the opportunity to prioritize areas of the engine that require attention, bring in new engine capabilities, and provide a plethora of tools and utilities to make using the engine a more comfortable experience.
Thank you to those that have already pledged their support, to those that are going to, and to the community as a whole for being the super-helpful people that you are!
JmonkeyEngine is, and always will be a free, open-source project. No splash screens, no fees and no requirement to mention jMonkeyEngine in your game at all.
Servers: $24 x 2 / month
Software Store Email Server: £10 / year (paid in GBP, I’m from England).
Domains: $10 x 2 / year
The hub server would really benefit from a storage upgrade. The store server is fine right now but will need to be upgraded when software is sold to account for storage and bandwidth.
Patreon takes 8% and Payoneer takes a cut, so the sponsor funding is not 1:1 as it shows on the Patreon page.
We are slightly short of being completely funded. I pick up any slack right now, which is somewhere around $5-$10 depending on the month.
Hm. I just looked. We purchased the droplet when the specs were different. I think we can upgrade for free to the same tier but new specs. That would mean double the memory and storage for nothing.
I’ll have to do some research and backing up before I do anything, though. I’ll keep the thread posted.
I dont want to make this super complicated and I am not to familiar with modern payment methods. Plus also put beside discussions about trust, transparancy etc for a while. But would it be usefull to have a normal acount? At least inside EURO I can transfer money via SEPA to any account without any fee. If I buy things from France, Spain etc. I have no banc fees at all.
What about Paypal (I dont have one) but everybody else has one.
But as I understood costs currently are caused in different countries and there might be a lot of different ways to pay (I know that Poland has several different services as Germany does…). So a (in sense of one or two only) global solutions would have advantages on the other hand?
There have been one or two people that mentioned one-time payments. PayPal also has a subscription setting.
It’s an option. My experience with taking payments from PayPal directly has not been overwhelmingly great. Disputes and refunds are an unfortunate side effect. Take into account that PayPal will ignore those problems if you make enough money for them (steam) and freeze your account if you don’t.
There are other payment systems I’ve used that offer the same functionality with a layer of security in front of it. If/when I do implement a system like this it would most likely be something like https://fastspring.com/
In general I feel the best would be to keep things as simple as possible. If there is a sponsor for the forum, that would be best. The engine itself is with github (free of charge) and the store is managed by you. So coming back to the initial post: We look for a way to have the forum (?) paid or hosted as it wont in future.
Here I disagree - financial support should be useable for all jME expenses. GitHub is free, so that’s not an issue - the store and forum both need financial support, however. @jayfella kindly volunteered a great deal of time to develop the store, and he’s volunteered financial support for it as well - but it benefits the whole community, so the financial burden for it should not fall to him. Having financing for other interests (bug bounties?) would be highly beneficial as well. Nobody likes to talk about the money (especially in open source projects), but sooner or later it’s unavoidable.
We live to fight another month thanks to the generocity of our Patreon Sponsors. Once we hit ~$150 a month I will begin the creation of the Bug Bounty System and start paying developers for fixing bugs! Not far to go!
