I would like to remind our community that our project lives and breathes because of the sale of CDs and the receipt of donations. In the last few years a few very large donations have allowed our hackathons to happen, but other than that we are always digging ourself a bigger and bigger hole.
Most of our user community increases their use of the FTP servers, while we naturally sell fewer CDs. For instance, I would approximate that the sale of every T-shirt we make probably does not pay for the electricity used in the machine room. It's about $5000 a year. This is placing a severe strain on our ability to toss money at projects. For instance, we want to hold more mini-hackathons, since they are so incredibly productive. And we would like to pay for more travel expenses for developers to these events, since there are always developers who are less fortunate. Yet almost all of our donations really do come from individuals, and almost none from companies using our software. Even though there are many many companies doing so. Some companies are small, but there are also quite large ones. And banks. Government institutions. Ones you see in the news every day. And operating system vendors who reuse our code. But financially we are under strain, and it is not letting us grow any of our bigger plans. If anyone has any real clout to make changes within institutions that could help us in the long term, please do. Like universities, or even companies that want to sponsor an entire hackathon. (But please do not send suggestions, because unfortunately we think we have heard every single one of them before, and people never listen when we say that it is not viable for us to play non-profit games, nor selling special merchandise, nor will it help to hire people to write special books. We've heard all these ideas before. Having us impliment more ideas does not help. It's time for outsiders to impliment things which just let us continue what we do).