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The Future of Payments and Open Source Support

lucumr.pocoo.org

31–40 of 80 posts

Re: The Future of Payments and Open Source Support

#31
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure it is. I'm not a huge fan of tip4commit either, I agree that it's opt-out model is bogus, but the fact that it uses Bitcoin seems irrelevant. The author seems to believe he cannot accept tips, because of tax and regulation, but he doesn't point out what specifically would cause problems here. Obviously people make and accept tips using euros all the time, this is not illegal, so why it would be different…

> So he has a generalised feeling that Bitcoin is bad because it's popular and has vocal fans, and that regulation is good yet also complicated, so anything which seems simple must be unregulated and therefore bad. The only (or at least, the main) argument we ever hear in favor of Bitcoin is that it's unregulated, and therefore it's liked by people who dislike regulation. Why, then, is it surprising or illogical for…

The way I read it, the GP mocks the idea that a self-regulated system would be unregulated. AFAICT It's at least regulated by convention with regards to the pay out for mining.

Re: The Future of Payments and Open Source Support

#32
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even supposing something was seriously wrong with Austrian law, it's a little presumptuous to expect everyone affected to try to fight that. Maybe they're already under careful watch by the national tax agency after getting audited because of some honest mistake the past year. Maybe they're under probation under a law you and I would call unjust, but triggering further law-enforcement attention lands them in jail reg…

Sure, of course. I haven't argued that he should be forced to accept tips against his will, that would be bizarre indeed.

http://wondermark.com/1k62/

You may have good intentions, but continually asking questions like "What specific law means you cannot do it?" (even politely) is still kind of rude. Who cares why he doesn't want tips; it's his call to make.

Re: The Future of Payments and Open Source Support

#33
post #15

I think what strikes me as the large-scale problem here is that some people are baffled by the concept that not wanting money might be a rational decision. As a completely different example of the same decision being rational, let's remember when Tarsnap wasn't accepting Canadian customers (despite a presumably sizable potential market) because dealing with Canadian sales tax law was too much overhead. Even if the pa…

> Not to mention I've heard stories of developers whose motivation to work on open-source projects has gone _down_ since getting paid, since it makes it seem like work instead of a hobby.

I am having trouble finding a good link, but I believe this effect is well documented in several areas – where compensating someone for an activity winds up with them being less likely to do it.

Re: The Future of Payments and Open Source Support

#34
> The problem was on one hand something I did not opt into (and there not being a way to opt out of) this tipping system and that it's a completely unregulated space that can cause me troubles I could have avoided otherwise.

While I have no qualm about his desire to avoid tip4commit, I find the mention of "unregulated space" peculiar. It seems that he is worried, and probably prudently so, about the fact that this space is highly regulated, not that it is unregulated.

Re: The Future of Payments and Open Source Support

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> author seems to believe he cannot accept tips, because of tax and regulation, but he doesn't point out what specifically would cause problems here. JFTR: "accepting tips" for software is something that is not at all straightforward. The way bountysource and others get around that is through invoices once a large enough amount has accumulated. I have no idea how that works in other countries. Gratipay/bountysource s…

Could you explain why accepting tips is so complicated? What specific law means you cannot do it? Let me put this another way. If your friends give you money for your birthday, do you give it back to them and tell them you can't accept their gift because of tax and regulation? I doubt it! You may well declare the gifts on your tax return if it's big enough to bother with, but if Austria makes it hard to accept cash g…

First let's get some perspective on the sums involved. One of the tip4commit spams I got after a commit informed me that my tip balance was 0.00000171 BTC. At current exchange rate this is equivalent in US dollars to $0.0005525523.

In other words, at a rate like that, it requires nearly two thousand tips just to add up to a single US dollar worth of tips.

And it gets worse. Remember that tip4commit "refunds" the tip back into the project pool if it's not claimed within 30 days. So just to get money out of this, you have to be making enough in tips, every 30 days, to overcome the cost in both time and potentially transaction fees of claiming the tips.

And then you have to do a bit more figuring to see if the money you'll get once cashed out is enough to justify the bookkeeping cost it imposes on you; after all, now that's income that you need to keep records of and figure into your taxes, which is not a zero-cost thing.

So first of all, you need to figure out the expected amount of tips, both over rolling 30-day periods and over the course of a year, which again is not a zero-cost thing, since if nothing else it involves spending time, and calculate whether they are enough to overcome the friction of getting the money out of tip4commit and then the cost of keeping records of and reporting it.

It is highly unlikely at this time that any person will be earning enough in tips from tip4commit to reach the point at which it becomes profitable even to the tune of a few units of local currency. A final data point for this: tip4commit states that it tips out at 1% of the balance of the project on each commit. Its attempt to tip me 0.00000171 BTC was for a commit on Django, which means the balance of donations for Django at that time was 0.000171 BTC, which simply cannot be enough to make it worth while for any person who contributes code to Django. And I don't rate it likely that there are a bunch of other projects with balances significantly larger, which means it is probable that there is currently no individual developer in the world for whom accepting tips from tip4commit is a profitable activity.

And that's without getting into the problems associated with the site displaying your name in tipping lists even if you never accept them, or the problems associated with displaying projects -- quite a few large open-source projects have associated non-profit foundations, and are bound by law regarding donations made for specific directed purposes. Although you can argue it's unlikely any person or organization would ever actually be punished based on tip4commit listing them, it certainly is possible that they could be called upon to prove that they are unaffiliated with tip4commit and refuse to accept the tips. Which, once again, is not zero-cost; now it potentially costs individuals and projects time and/or money for something they had no control over because tip4commit "opted" them in forcibly and continues to drag its feet on opt-out.

All in all, this is a mess. It probably should just shut down, but if it stays operating it's going to keep getting heat, and will keep deserving it, until it switches to being based only on explicit opt-in.

Re: The Future of Payments and Open Source Support

#36
post #33
post #15

I think what strikes me as the large-scale problem here is that some people are baffled by the concept that not wanting money might be a rational decision. As a completely different example of the same decision being rational, let's remember when Tarsnap wasn't accepting Canadian customers (despite a presumably sizable potential market) because dealing with Canadian sales tax law was too much overhead. Even if the pa…

> Not to mention I've heard stories of developers whose motivation to work on open-source projects has gone _down_ since getting paid, since it makes it seem like work instead of a hobby. I am having trouble finding a good link, but I believe this effect is well documented in several areas – where compensating someone for an activity winds up with them being less likely to do it.

Dan Ariely talks quite well about the subject of social norms vs financial norms and how just assuming you can move an activity from one to the other is very ignorant.

http://danariely.com/the-books/excerpted-from-chapter-4-%E2%...

If some "pay for open source work" scheme got github level popular it would completely destroy open source for a long time. Right now there is more work being done than the community could pay for. But at the same time, it's handy to use bribes to get some necessary but boring stuff done.

Re: The Future of Payments and Open Source Support

#37
I don't understand this whole controversy. The the amount of money donate to you is so small (like under a dollar over the course of a year) then you don't need to declare it on any tax forms. If a random person on the street gives you a quarter, you on't need to report that on taxes, nor do you have to report a 0.00017 BTC donation.

On the other hand, if the donation is big (say in the thousands USD), I can see why someone could decide to not accept the donation because they don't wan to report it on their taxes. An easy solution to this problem is to NOT TAKE THE DONATION. If you don't take the money, you don't have to report anything. The tip4commit site supposedly states if a developer doesn't accept a donation the money goes back to the 'project pool' where it will get donated to another developer on that project.

Re: The Future of Payments and Open Source Support

#38
post #21

I envy this guy for living in a country where you can say things like that: The reason I bring this up is because our taxes are very high, but I get something for that money. It might not be the perfect system and there are lots of things about it that make me furious, but I do not see a reason why I would want to stop paying taxes. That must be one heck of a feeling. Gives me hope for the future.

That quote makes it clear he really doesn't understand where his tax money goes.

So what sorts of horrible, unbelievably terrible things do you think are being done with his tax money that would cause him to reject the tax rate if only he knew?

Re: The Future of Payments and Open Source Support

#39

I don't understand this whole controversy. The the amount of money donate to you is so small (like under a dollar over the course of a year) then you don't need to declare it on any tax forms. If a random person on the street gives you a quarter, you on't need to report that on taxes, nor do you have to report a 0.00017 BTC donation. On the other hand, if the donation is big (say in the thousands USD), I can see why…

> The tip4commit site supposedly states if a developer doesn't accept a donation the money goes back to the 'project pool' where it will get donated to another developer on that project.

So tip4commit is being dishonest -- if the project has said that none of their contributors will ever accept a tip it is dishonest to continue accepting contributions for that project.

Re: The Future of Payments and Open Source Support

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you explain why accepting tips is so complicated? What specific law means you cannot do it? Let me put this another way. If your friends give you money for your birthday, do you give it back to them and tell them you can't accept their gift because of tax and regulation? I doubt it! You may well declare the gifts on your tax return if it's big enough to bother with, but if Austria makes it hard to accept cash g…

1) In many countries, unlike USA, a majority of people don't ever handle a "tax return" or "file taxes" - if your income consists of standard salaries or student stipends or social security/etc, then the employer is required to handle everything and you can generally ignore the issue unless you start doing business or selling real estate or whatever. For a normal person, the cost of starting to file taxes (and invest…

Generic endorsement of this comment, coming from someone who has an international business and has occasionally had to decline tips, for these (and other [+]) reasons.

I once had a gentleman attempt to put a rather small sum of money in my hand. Call it $50. He meant it as a nice gesture, because he had been consuming my professional output for years, and it had helped his business. He could not have known, but causing me to have US-source income would have potentially exposed me to several thousand dollars in additional tax liability during that year. (Long story.) There exist ways around it, but at the very least I would have had to loop my accountant in on the incident, so we could discuss whether I have to worry about the $50 "donation."

My accountant's rate is $10. Per minute.

All of this was going through my head when I attempted to gracefully decline.

[+] Totally separate from tax/compliance, I have social reasons why I prefer to not get tipped for things. Social expectations are a weird thing, but regardless of their intrinsic weirdness they appear to be real, and as a result I try to hew to them unless I have a really strong reason to not to. One feature of social classes in the US is that the one I aspire to be in does not accept tips. Tips are something which flow from the relatively well-off to the relatively poorly-off, and even in those relationships where I'm relatively poorly-off, lumping myself in with waiters and massage therapists doesn't sound advantageous when I hope to have a professional image closer to that of a doctor, lawyer, or investment advisor.

For related reasons, I remain very concerned that many OSS developers appear to think that they should have to throw hundreds of hours of professional labor into projects used by for-profit companies so that they can be allowed to participate in Internet busking on a scale which would be sneered at by actual buskers.

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