On Friday 14. September 2018 09.06.50 Bernhard E. Reiter wrote: > > Am Donnerstag 13 September 2018 17:05:41 schrieb Andreas Nilsson: > > > > The idea is to make an economical funding platform. The platform itself > > only communicates between the two parties users and developers, > > economically. > > This has been tried a number of times in the past and hasn't worked out > well.
It is worth noting that there are a number of recurring obstacles. Gratipay was attempting to pioneer consolidated payments between individuals, but there is a very narrow path that needs to be navigated to avoid being considered as some kind of financial institution that holds other people's money whilst also processing payments (or delegating that processing) in a way that does not overwhelm the actual payments with processing fees. Liberapay took over where Gratipay left off, but their payment processor has discontinued its relationship with Liberapay, apparently claiming that they didn't think that Liberapay was fulfilling its obligations: https://liberapay.com/ https://github.com/liberapay/liberapay.com/issues/1171 There seems to have been an account linked to an organisation which cannot be legally serviced by the payment provider, and I guess the blame fell on Liberapay for that. (This is from a quick perusal of public information about this, so it may not be completely accurate.) Other organisations exist, but it isn't completely clear how they operate in a similar position without getting hassled about financial industry/crime regulations. Here are some examples: https://www.bountysource.com/ https://tidelift.com/ https://opencollective.com/ Open Collective seems like it promotes a model that I may have advocated before, emphasising collectives (which Gratipay and Liberapay both support). If you have an organisation like the Python Software Foundation, to take an example I tend to use, then one could envisage establishing a presence on such a platform to solicit funding for Python development, where those giving money might have reason to assume that their money is going to the right people due to the presence of an entity they know and trust. Meanwhile, those doing the work would presumably be able to receive payments in a properly-regulated way. Then again, I am inclined to think that such platforms tend to favour transactional work, often underpriced, that is viewed as fashionable amongst the relentless promotion of the "gig" economy (hence the venture funding for some of the companies above). Instead, I think that structures to fund Free Software should enable developers to actually draw a salary, not have people speculatively do work in order to compete for payouts. Maybe what is really needed is some kind of virtual organisation for Free Software, maybe some kind of consulting organisation. Naturally, there are non-virtual organisations of this nature already, but the bottlenecks are getting hired by them and for those businesses to be able to hire people. And recruitment is still largely performed using pre-digital techniques (if you ignore the superficial use of digital tools). > What could help would be a system for micropayments that is easy and > has low transaction costs. Another approach would be to have a > organisations that distribute small amounts of money (e.g. GNU system > distributors would be in a good position to do so.) A key point is peoples > willingness to pay for something, even if they are not force to. Micropayments with low transaction costs is like the Holy Grail of payments, though. But the matter of persuading people to pay for stuff is worth further thought, and there was a blog article about that recently: http://think-innovation.com/blog/should-you-donate-to-open-source-software/ One thing I ought to mention is the need for solutions that use real money as opposed to today's favourite cryptocurrency. When looking for creative solutions there always appears to be someone wanting to sweep everything off the table to further their "cipherpunk" anarchist pipedream. People need genuine solutions that do not involve financial speculation, legal uncertainty, and exposure to criminal schemes. A crucial aspect of funding Free Software is exactly that of giving people certainty so that they can focus on what they actually want to do. Paul _______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list Discussion@lists.fsfe.org https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion This mailing list is covered by the FSFE's Code of Conduct. All participants are kindly asked to be excellent to each other: https://fsfe.org/about/codeofconduct
