That's the point I was trying to make earlier, when I said that with independent projects like Slackware, the line between "life" and "work" is blurry. The team behind Slackware isn't Red Hat. They don't run a business and we're not customers. IMHO, that's one of the reasons why Slackware doesn't suck, too.

Patrick isn't my friend or anything, I just use his software (quite silently, I might add) -- but if I can help with anything, I'm glad to, because this is how communities are supposed to work. It's not even about being grateful (which I am). It's not so much about about helping Slackware the distribution, either, (although, arguably, it would help) as it is about helping Slackware the community, which is even more important in my opinion.

It's not even about repaying someone for their efforts and for all their help, even though I definitely have a lot to repay, too (like many other users in this thread, I also learned a lot by using Slackware, and I make a living writing Linux software today). It's just that one of us is in a bad place right now and of course we gotta help, what else are we supposed to do?

Reading Pat's post about The Slackware Store, the financial situation and especially mishandling of donations was just too much for me.
We need to act NOW!

Pat, please just post your bank account number or PO box and allow us to support Slackware.

I used Slackware years ago and posted here a bit under other accounts. It has always been my favorite distribution. Life happened and gaming replaced Linux as my digital entertainment. I’m back to throw in my support for Slackware. I’d like to install the newest version and I will - after I’ve paid for it!

Edit: Contributed. Looking forward to future releases.

What about doing a crowdfunding project for Slackware, such as many projects on Kickstarter or similar?

I think Patreon would be good. You can subscribe easily enough and I'm sure plenty of people would be happy to chip in a few bucks and maybe give something back for 25yrs of work.

There's a selfish motive too; I want Slackware to be around a long time as it's so good.

Apparently Bitcoins can go to this address:

**removed**

Source:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17608466

EDIT: As mentioned by Darth, this has not come from an official source. May be better to wait until it is confirmed.

EDIT2: This has been quashed by PV. I'm glad that this has been flagged so that no-one falls for it.

UNLESS this information is literally confirmed by our BDFL, I for one I will prefer to be careful with that. ;)

Indeed. This is a good point. I shall amend the post above.

Agreed. I will wait for the man to post the donation details.

Pat, I'm really sorry that you've gone through all of this. I've cut my teeth on Linux with Slackware 9 after 8.0 beat me to submission. :-) I've loved Slackware since and, while I now use it side-by-side with Fedora on my home PCs, it's the only Linux distribution that holds a special place in my heart. Whatever you decide as an alternative for donations, I'll be sure to help out with what I can. Thank you immensely for creating Slackware and to the people that help maintain it. I couldn't have learned Linux (or even the BSDs) without it.

I agree. What IRC channel would that communication have taken place anyway? I can kind of imagine him actually doing that bitcoin reply in IRC for some reason. It would be a shame if people were scammed again before he deployed a funding mechanism.

Whilst I can't speak on behalf of Patrick either, in the interests of the community here -- I will tell you that he's been discussing it with the core team, and that as of yesterday evening he had not set up any way to receive money nor had decided exactly how and where to accept it. It's top of his priority list, but as everyone here has already pointed out -- there are many options, none of which are perfect.
Presumably we'll either update the www.slackware.com web site, or set up a sub domain under slackware.com to contain the support options.

This just sounds like some opportunistic guy.

Thank you for the reply! That is good. He is surrounded by good people. So I guess what people need to take away is that they shouldn't be sending money to anything that isn't announced on slackware.com's main page.

This situation is terrible and it makes me angry that Patrick has been treated in this way.

Slackware is the first Linux distro I have ever used, and I learned a lot while using it over the years. Patrick's dedication is admirable, and he should be adequately compensated for all the work he's doing.

As soon as there is a way to donate directly to Patrick, I will do so.

Bitcoins can indeed go to that address, just like donations used to be able to go to the store.

IT'S NOT ME. Folks, I'm still reading this long and remarkable thread and will try to comment on it about more than this, but needed to head this one off at the pass. As I commented there, I wasn't really ready to post yet when I did (wanted to set up a Patreon or something first), but really couldn't let the store just keep on collecting donations when I had little faith that I'd ever see any of them. Of course, NOW the store says they'll be sending me the collected funds, but I'll believe that when I see it.

I'd still like to get a Patreon, or a more official PayPal than my personal one. And I need to follow up on some ideas that landed in my email. Plus my air conditioning repair I got yesterday lasted about an hour and my machine has already overheated and locked up once today. Pretty sure the hard drive is about to fail even though SMART doesn't think so.

Anyway, the reason I'm leaning towards Patreon is that it might be a more predictable source of income that would allow me to focus on the project rather than having fund drives all the time. Though I do love public radio - there's nothing wrong with a good fund drive. I already got a couple of PayPal donations from friends who knew my PayPal link already, so I'll be having to figure out how to pay taxes on my PayPal income anyway. So it would probably be fine to use that now, but I'd rather have a better plan. Like I said, I still need to catch up on this thread.

So in lieu of a more permanent solution I'll offer up my PayPal link: https://www.paypal.me/volkerdi


Thanks for your support!