What for?

We want YafaRay to become a useful tool to render our ideas and a real and powerful alternative to proprietary engines. Your donation will help the YafaRay Project to make it possible. Yafaray is currently used by a great community of professionals, proud hobbyists, students and academic institutions for free, as in free speech. We would like to extend this freedom not only to software, but to the support tools needed to learn YafaRay. If you don't have time or skills to donate, please consider about donating money. Your generosity allows the YafaRay project to continue. Donations will be used for:

• Paying for the YafaRay Project's expenses, such as hosting and domain registry.
• Development of YafaRay through scholarships and staffing.
• Promoting use of YafaRay, through workshops and contests.
• Community building, through community events and meetings.

Donations.

Any amount of money you can give is welcome. If you have a credit or debit card, you can donate to the YafaRay Project via Click & Pledge:

To donate via a check or money order, please take a look at this page. Donors will be acknowledged in our Donors page if they agree to be so (a question is formulated during the donation checkout). Contact our Project Liaison if you have got any question about donating to the YafaRay Project.

Sponsors.

This option is made available for individuals and businesses willing to donate large amounts of money. Sponsors will be acknowledged with a logo & link in our Donors page. Besides, Gold and Platinum sponsors will be announced in the YafaRay Home page. We have established four sponsoring levels, defined by the amount of money donated, which are:

• Bronze Sponsorship, 128 €/ Year. This sponsorship level could be appropiated for small shops and architects' studios using YafaRay. We could use this money to fund the annual YafaRay contest, to help with hosting costs or to renew domains for some time.
• Silver Sponsorship, 256 €/ Year. This is approximately the annual cost of hosting the YafaRay site, as per 2010 requirements.
• Gold Sponsorship, 512 €/ Year. With this money we can fund developers and volunteers to attend conferences and important events or upgrade our hosting plan if required.
• Platinum Sponsorship, 1024 €/ Year. This amount of money could help us to organise our own events, to hire a developer part-time or to set up a scolarship program.

Please contact our Project Liaison for more details.

Donations of equipment and services.

We rely on the donation of equipment and services from individuals, companies and universities, to keep YafaRay connected to the world. If your company has any idle machines or spare equipment lying around, please consider donating them to the YafaRay project. Donors of equipment and services will be acknowledged in our Donors page. Please contact our Project Liaison for details.

Legal framework.

YafaRay donations are handled by a legal entity called SPI (SOFTWARE IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST INC). SPI is an non-profit umbrella organization which was founded to help projects develop and distribute free open source software and hardware. SPI sponsors renowned projects like Debian, OpenOffice.org, PostgreSQL and others:

http://www.spi-inc.org/

We have chosen this method because it helps us to handle monetary matters in an honest, aseptic and transparent way. YafaRay funds must be used as per non-profit organisation's rules. Apart from the monthly report made by the SPI board, the Yafaray team will report to the Community about how much money is collected and how it is expent.

Employee Giving Program.

Some companies allow their employees to make donations to free open source project as part of their annual charitable giving campaigns. In this case, corporate employee giving programs would donate to SPI and mention YafaRay as the intended recipient of the funds. All donations made through the employee giving program should be tax deductible in the U.S.A. Please contact our Project Liaison for details.

Tax Information.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) of the United States government determined that under section 501 (a) of the Internal Revenue Code, SPI qualifies for 501 (c) (3) (non-profit organization) status under section 509 (a) (1) and 170 (b) (1) (A) (vi). This means that all donations made to SPI and its associated projects (such as YafaRay), should be tax deductible for donors in the United States of America. People or businesses should consult their tax advisor for further information on this matter.