Accepting donations

How we accept donations

One of FPA’s tasks is to accept donations from individuals and corporations and spend it on bettering FreeCAD and its ecosystem, organize events that broaden FreeCAD’s reach, and otherwise improve how FreeCAD operates as a project.

We will accept donations from all companies and individuals who want to finanically contribute to the project’s wellbeing. However, it is within the realm of possibilities that some bad actors could use donations to influence the project in a way that is not acceptable for the community. Realistically, we have very few resources to do due diligence where the money is coming from.

We also have a good track record distributing funds as grants for developers. But for companies that want very specific changes in FreeCAD, we cannot work as a middle man between employer and contractor.

Thus the following ground rules apply:

• We will accept donations from individuals and companies alike on the “no strings attached” basis.
• We trust donors to be good actors, and donors trust the FPA to do the right thing. Our financial decisions are transparent to prove that.
• We will not accept donations aimed solely at placing a link on the FreeCAD sponsors page. Sponsoring companies must have some form of relationship with the FreeCAD project.
• We will ask companies and individuals who want to donate a substantial amount of money about their history with FreeCAD and why they are donating.
• We reserve the right to say ‘no’ to a particular company or individual if we have reasons to think that the affiliation will hurt FreeCAD’s reputation.
• In potentially problematic cases, we will put decision on accepting a donation up for voting to the FPA’s general assembly.
• We will not act as a middle man between a company that wants specific changes in FreeCAD and FreeCAD contributors and expects us to organize a grant. However, we can connect such a company with a potential developer and expect them to work out a deal and then follow the general contributions routine should the code be contributed back to the upstream project.