A new funding model for open source software

You have an account, filled with a monthly recurring amount, what ever amount that is. Then you click these "contribute" buttons, placed by the open source project webmasters in their pages.

Each click of button registers that project to your account and the site distributes your monthly amount among those registered projects.

Not able to recollect the name of the company though. Spreadrr, or Poolr or something.

Edit: Another comment got it. It's Flattr

It sounds like there would also be no intermediary handling taxes. Each person receiving donations would be liable for dealing with taxes themselves, which could involve having to deal with the tax systems in every country/state in which one of their donors resides.

Unless your plan is to just ignore taxes and hope any tax authority that might want to come after you won't be able to obtain jurisdiction, you really want anything that involves accepting money from all over the world to go through some intermediary that operates in such a way as that intermediary is the merchant of record for the transaction.

There also might be issues with sanctions. If your country has sanctions against country X and you accept donations from someone in country X that might violate your country's laws. An intermediary can handle keeping track of that, making sure you only get donations from places that your country allows.

This could be even worse than the tax issues--at least with the tax issues it is other countries that might be trying to sue and/or prosecute you. With sanctions violations it is your own country, which is usually a lot harder to successful blow off.

Old-school financial arrangements aren't as cool, are much more complicated and much more expensive. But they are also vastly more robust against many, many edge conditions. High-level expertise is plentifully available to pretty much any degree of specialisation required.

Ethereum smart contracts don't work like that. It is push, not pull. The Ethereum world computer cannot schedule or initiate tasks without you creating and signing a transaction. Cryptocurrency just can't do subscriptions. The workaround is to send the cryptocurrency to a third-party custodial which then disburses subscription payments, but now you have regulatory hurdles, because there's a trusted entity that is holding your money.

My project is essentially a reddit-esque site that hosts images/blogs/video/audio content. Each vote on a piece of content gives it one share of your funding pool for that month. The pool based approach is definitely the best for simple usability, but there's another aspect to it as well: it means you weigh your vote more. In the case of a social sharing/news site, low-effort content will get upvoted less, as you have to consider that every vote will dilute the pool.

I'm really bought in on this as an overall concept and I think it's something that will be extremely healthy for the web overall. Previously this was a model that was used by Flattr, but they had a major issue that not everyone was on their platform, so often times creators wouldn't get money out of a donation (because they didn't know the donation existed). I definitely agree with the author here that if this were to be done, Github themselves would have to implement it. As soon as a third party who isn't hosting the content implements it, an enormous percentage of creators wont know they have funding waiting for them and things fall apart.