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We're happy to receive donations from companies and consultants who make use of our software in their business. We're also very grateful for donations from users of our software and from others wishing to support our project. On the other hand, we do not want donations from people who have own free and Open Source software and/or non-commercial computer security projects. That's because we consider ourselves part of these same communities, and moving money back and forth within the communities only benefits the payment processors.
It is our policy to acknowledge donations of $100 (US) or above on the Openwall donations web page, along with an optional link to the donor's personal, company, or project website (relevant sites are preferred, most are OK, some might be inappropriate). Smaller donations won't be acknowledged on the web page (you're donating to help us improve the software, not edit web pages, right?), but are nevertheless greatly appreciated. Recurring donations will be acknowledged on the web page once the total accrues to $100 or more.
If you're donating $100 or more or setting up a recurring donation, please specify the person, company, and/or project to acknowledge and the desired link URL (if any) or mention that you'd like to remain anonymous (if that's your choice) in your payment comments or in an e-mail to <donations at openwall.com>. It may take a few days for us to add the acknowledgement; please be patient.
Please note that, while the above is our current policy, your donations are assumed to be genuine, and thus no sale occurs when you make a donation. A policy change is possible, and acknowledgements of past donations may be moved or even removed from the website. The current intent is to move most acknowledgements for prior years donations to sub-pages, but this might change.
In accordance with our current interpretation of Google's webmaster guidelines, we set the rel="nofollow" attribute on acknowledgement links for monetary donations unless the target website is relevant to ours ("also in IT") or we have other extra reasons to believe that the donation was indeed genuine. This attribute does not affect human website visitors' ability to follow links, but it tells search engines to disregard those links to irrelevant sites.
We do not link to scam sites, adult entertainment sites, and to sites with unsolicited popups and the like (and we never did). We will no longer add new links to gambling and pharmaceutical sites, although some existing links on prior years sub-pages are grandfathered for now (to the best of our knowledge, those sites are otherwise OK - not scams, no popups, etc.) We may also refuse to link to sites that, in our sole discretion, would appear to have been promoted via any type of spamming activity (unsolicited blog comments, e-mail, etc.), and we may remove applicable existing links for this offence.
