For most of the first decade of Boxes.py I didn't even think about monetizing the project. To be fair: After the project's start I was without a laser cutter for almost two years and nothing was happening anyway. Even when development was going again and the topic came up, I wasn't interested. This was a just for fun project and nothing I wanted to turn into a job or side hustle. Also it is my personal contribution to the Open Source community in general. Yes, I very much understand that many projects are nowadays sponsored or driven by corporations or large organizations, but I like to pretend that most Free Software is still held up by single contributors like myself and each of us is adding their share. 

Anyway, the last years requests for a way to donate money have become more frequent. Beside my general hesitation it also required setting up the web instance properly from a legal POV. Being located in Germany that meant getting an Impressum and all the DSGVO declarations (the German implementation of the EU's GDPR). All topics I am just as interested as getting a hole drilled into my knee. As a result not much happened except people opening a ticket and me pointing them to the very brief and also German only page of Boxes.py on my hackerspace's web page. This had (and still has) a simple PayPal link as part of the project template.

While this was just meant as a temporary fix, it made it clear to me, that I don't want donations to me personally at all. Even more so now with the huge amount of 3rd party contributions. It would be really weird to showcase all this work from other people and then turn around and say "Please give me money ". I realized that my hackerspace (backspace e.V. in Bamberg,  Germany) might be a possible place to direct donations to even long term. But it still felt a bit arbitrary. Like why would you care for a random hacker space in Upper Franconia which may be or may not be on the other end of the world from you. 

But things changed last year. My hacker space started hosting the web instance after the virtual server running it previously had more and more problems. This now allows me to just reuse the legal stuff from there. It also makes a lot more sense now to point donations in that direction. As a German nonprofit ("gemeinnütziger Verein") it also can accept donations easily without creating paper work for myself.

So over the new year's break I did not only write the retrospective but also resurrected previous efforts of getting a donation page done. Then I realized that no one would see it anyway - with all the links being at the bottom of the page. So a little bit of rearranging later the help and documentation and the language selection can now actually be found. Guess that alone makes this all worth it. 

So here we are. There is now a Give back link on the website. Should you go there? Yes, yes you should. Should you donate some money? Probably not. There are a lot of better causes to donate money to. Does it still feel good if people show their appreciation and the value they get from Boxes.py this way? Oh yes, yes it does.

So to everyone who has donated already: Thank you very much!