Okay, I must be blind because I can’t see how to donate to RT, which is something I would like to do. So can someone tell this stupid English person how to do it please 
5 Likes
Hi Andy,
here you go
2 Likes
Hi,
thanks for the link!
But why can’t this link be found on the website of Raw Therapee or anywhere else? It is only mentioned in this forum a few times but why is it not mentioned on any official website?
My guess : the RT devs don’t like donations, or they are too shy to shout that out loud ! 
I really appreciate that people want to donate to RT!
What annoys me, is, that there are companies which use RT to make profit by processing thousands of raw files per day without even offering a donation.
How can we accept donations from individual users in that case?
Just a thought…
2 Likes
What companies? And how do you know they use RT?
You can always accept donations by individual users, regardless of what certain companies are (not) doing…
True
I can understand the frustration but I’d like to add a bit of perspective to this.
As an individual I donate to various open source projects at least at the end of every year.
But if you don’t directly own the company it can be quite difficult to get budget for donations to open source projects in the corporate world. There are some ways around this like buying support and trainings from the developers, hiring them for well paid freelance gigs or sponsoring local conferences.
I’m not quite sure what could work for rawtherapee there but I could imagine there being options.
In general the tragedy of the commons that is the funding of open source projects really saddens me - especially because I don’t have a solution to it either. All I can so is my little part. 
3 Likes
So I process thousands of RAW files, maybe not every day but sometimes 2000 per week. I also make profit with these files. I switched from Lightroom to RT a time ago and I have a bad conscience because I save A LOT of money with this software change and RT gets nothing from this money. Furthermore I am really dependent on RT and I want that it stays up to date also in the future. I am not a good programmer so I can’t help them… But I would have already donated if there would have been a donate button.
I even signed up here because I was really confused why nobody wants my money 
Edit: Thanks to RT I was able to switch all my operating systems completely to Linux
6 Likes
We are not developers and we don’t contribute to development of RT, but we make this, the official forum, go, we redesigned the website and offer whatever else we can for RT and other projects.
So if you have money burning a hole in your pocket, wed be delighted by your contribution: PIXLS.US - Support
7 Likes
I am also curious of what companies you are referring to, and how you know.
I know I have used Rawtherapee semi-professionally, and have tried to help out by making bug reports and promote Rawtherapee by mentioning it in any artistic work in which I used Rawtherapee.
1 Like
Also, is there any proof, other than the recommendation from @heckflosse which has been very active in developement for sure based on activity on this site, that money sent over the Maciej Dwarak paypal link will in fact go towards Rawtherapee development? I am not personally doubting Ingo Weyrich or Maciej Dworak, but know that many people may be skeptical of donating money to randos online. Having maybe some sort of transparency indicator, documentation, or donate button on the RT website may be helpful in any of our potential efforts to persuade others to donate.
3 Likes
Hello @Waveluke
I am also curious of what companies you are referring to, and how you know.
Yep. I am very curious too 
Personally, I would have never thought about this possibility because, in Italy, where I live, there is very little information about RawTherapee on the newspapers for photographers.
For instance, personally, at home, I run RawTherapee but at work we have bought Capture one Pro to manage our pictures.
As regards the money donated to RawTherapee I still remember that the original developer of RawTherapee, when the software was still running only on Windows and it was freeware, explained that he had received very little money as donations over the years despite the huge amount of downloads since the software was free. This was probably the reason why he decided to stop working on it in the end. Luckilly he released the code as open source later on
In Italy, for the pubblic sector, it would be very difficult to donate some money to the open source softwares due to the paperwork involved. On the contrary, it is relatively easier to buy a commercial licence for a software…
Just to give you an example of the paperwork involved, in the very big public sector where I work It took more than a year to buy a Nikon D850…
Currently the low amount of donations is used to buy things to improve RT (RawDigger license, Color Checker to make dcp…)
2 Likes
That seems like a rather small one time startup cost of $200.
I was more commenting on the sketchy look of donating to a private person over Paypal, even though the personal knowledge we have in this community is enough for Pixls regulars to feel it’s legit.
1 Like
Maciej is one of the original developers of RT. Also, of you can’t trust @heckflosse, you probably shouldn’t trust RT at all.
Lots of European devs, as I understand it, don’t accept donations because they have good jobs already and it complicates their taxes.
4 Likes
I trust you, Maciej and Heckflosse personally, I was more saying talking about casual people who aren’t as involved as we are and might want to support FOSS software, but be put off by a random personal Paypal link.
You are 100% right here, that should be a RawTherapee name.
But it is PayPal that forces a user to use her or his own name. I remember years ago that I tried to set up a PayPal account for RawTherapee together with DrSlony, aka Maciej Dwarak, aka Morgan Hardwood, and as far as I know (or remember), that did not work. Those donation accounts take the personal name of the PayPal account holder. So a PayPal account for RawTherapee (with that name) was not possible. Perhaps we oversaw some things…
As a side note, if you wanted you could donate to PIXLS and make a note that it’s for RT. I’ll make sure it gets to them (https://paypal.me/patdavid).
Part of the problem is that there’s no legal entity “RawTherapee” that can accept donations, only individuals. I was hoping to eventually rectify that by having PIXLS be an umbrella for projects to handle that stuff for them, but it hasn’t happened yet.
3 Likes