Donation?

[Sean M. Brannon]

Hello. First off, thank you very much for this project. I have used it for quite some time to monitor my home storage, and, in a previous life long ago, as a sysadmin to monitor the storage under my care. Smartmontools is a unique, in my experience, open source package that I am sure has saved the data of many a person and organization. The closest equivalent I have come across is a commercial tool called SMARTMon-UX by SANtools (www.santools.com).

I looked around smartmontools' various web pages, both here and on SourceForge?, and couldn't find a way to donate financially to the project. While just a single person, I thought I could donate at least a small amount to help defray the hosting costs. Do you have a means for me to do this?

Again, thank you very much for smartmontools!

[Alex Samorukov]

First of all, thank you for your mail. It is very uncommon in the OSS community to get such, usually, e-mails are demanding to fix something :) And I am very glad that you found smartmontools useful.

I can't speak for the entire team, but at least for the hosting currently, no donations are needed. At the moment I am hosting the project on my server, which I am using for other tasks, so it is not adding anything to the bill. Also, we had a negotiation with Digital Ocean who has an OSS support program, but after all, I decided to keep things as is. I am more concerned about track development status and py2 EoL (see #1419). To me, it also would be more important to get more project developers, as we have several things to improve (see ​https://www.smartmontools.org/report/1), some OS without active maintainers and some outdated ports.

I will keep the ticket open to make sure that other smartmontools project members can share their thoughts.