[software] Update from Donor.com

[Josh Berkus]

Folks,

I just realized when Bradley mentioned it that this mail went to a 
private list and not to -software.  My comments later.

Mike Schroeder of Donor.com wrote:

"We had our board meeting this morning.  Our board is officially 
interested in pursuing the open sourcing of our full product line.  I 
have been given 5 internal metrics that need to be addressed as part of 
the final decision.  We are meeting again on December 18th, and 
providing the 5 metrics have been met, we expect to make a formal board 
resolution.  At this point, assuming there are no unforeseen roadblocks, 
there is no reason to expect we would reverse our interest in pursuing 
open source.

We would appreciate your help on 2 of the 5 metrics:
1) Legal - Karen - Bruce and I would like to schedule a call with you. 
We want some additional perspective on our legal and intellectual 
property issues.
2) Grants - Michael - Bruce and and I would like to schedule a call with 
you as well to discuss possible grant-based funding of the DonorWare 
Foundation and the open sourcing of donor.com.


Also, during our last phone call, I had some homework assigned to me.  I 
wanted to follow up on that:

1) Screenshots of various donation pages
2) Add support for Pay Pal and Google Checkout payment options
3) effort to bring FISCO/APSCO GL and accounts payable to production 
ready state

I will send the screenshots to Michael Dexter since he requested them - 
I will send them separately since they are quite large files.

For items 2 and 3, we did an internal rough estimate (our triage 
estimate is part of our Triage, Discovery, Definition, Estimate process 
aka TDDE).  We typically don't do a detailed estimate until after 
Discovery and Definition are complete, so these are just meant as rough 
ideas.  Here are the initial results:

2) PayPal/Google Checkout - 3 to 10 days effort PLUS 50% for QA, Testing 
and Documentation
    - would seamlessly integrate into the checkout process
    - would pass along a session key to the remote processor
    - the return landing page from the remote processor would pass the 
session key back
    - would store the auth/ref code from PayPal or Google with the gift 
transaction in DASCO

3) FISCO/APSCO - 2 to 4 man months of effort (444 hours) PLUS 50% for 
QA, Testing and Documentation
    - would ensure all 33K lines of C are updated for new MySQL/Linux 
environment
    - would allow all GL and AP functions to have exposed API methods
    - would include wxWidgets GUI frames for all functionality
    - APIs would be available to create alternate interfaces (eg a 
web-based P&L per project)
    - FISCO/APSCO capabilities include:
        - support for multiple budgets per GL account
        - unlimited historical accumulators per GL account
        - support to create multiple arbitrary hierarchal reporting 
structures
        - support for summary level accounts with automatic rollup
        - recurring GL vouchers
        - recurring AP vouchers
        - basic workflow to allow separate creation of AP vouchers and 
subsequent check creation
        - automatic feed of GL transactions from DASCO (fundraising) and 
SAFARI (Sales, Fulfillment, Accounts Receivable and Inventory control)
        - much more that is not covered in this brief summary

Obviously the FISCO/APSCO project is non-trivial, but even at a rate of 
$90/hour, this would come in at 1/4 to 1/2 of the projected cost of 
rolling your own fundraising system from scratch, and you would get all 
of the other capabilities in the rest of our product line.  While we 
would would be open to contributions of labor to offset the cost of this 
project, there would still be significant effort on our part to ensure 
open source developers were up to speed on the intricacies of this 
particular project.

Please let me know where you see this moving next.  We are interested in 
moving forward."