I have been running an open source MathJax-based mathematics pastebin[1] since 2012 and I had received 2 donations for it until recently. Then a mathematician tweeted[2] about it convincing others to send some donations. After that kind gesture by him, I received 3 more donations. So pretty sure I can't make a living out of donations. :-) But I still appreciate them because they help in covering a portion of the host…
What kind of legal notices are you routinely dealing with? That's a frightening aspect of maintaining an open source side project I hadn't really considered.
It makes me sad to see developers donating time and effort to support an ecosystem (VSCode) built explicitly to spy on users and promote proprietary software. The fact that VSC's core is released under an open source license is irrelevant to the harm that is being done.
Can you elaborate? As for as I've seen, disabling telemetry in VSCode is pretty straight forward.
Last I checked, opting out of telemetry doesn't disable the autoupdate checks (another inadvertent form of telemetry), and also sends a telemetry event when opting out, which is a clear violation of user consent.
It makes me sad to see developers donating time and effort to support an ecosystem (VSCode) built explicitly to spy on users and promote proprietary software. The fact that VSC's core is released under an open source license is irrelevant to the harm that is being done.
Do you really think any of what you just said will be effective to your target demographic without being far more detailed, containing any sort of sources, or while being this unnecessarily inflammatory? All the people you wish would care will scoff, dismiss the comment as being looney and that'll be that. You have to realize that, unfortunately, in every part of life, marketing matters. Got to make a message your au…
You seem to have mistaken my comment for one intending to be persuasive.
I wish for people to be informed, not to care. What matters to someone is an individual decision.
The first donation to my open source project (1) came from someone who went through the trouble of emailing me to ask how they could donate. Since then, I've embraced receiving donations and last year I ended up receiving more than 10.000 euro. (2) I (re)donate everything to charity, for reasons (3), but even then it's a great motivator. If it wasn't for the money I would have burned out long ago. It really means a l…
I just read your reasons (3), and I think you are pretty awesome. Thanks for doing this!
How is that compatible with Rahankeräyslaki, which explicitly forbids soliciting money from the general public without a permit?
The iirc court of appeals has confirmed that merely having a donation link is okay. So you might legally be somewhat limited in what you can write there (like "donate to me SO THAT I can write more code YOU enjoy"), but saying "Support me / donate to me / Support my work through Ko-Fi" is entirely fine.
You have to remember that we're talking about a country whose police considered Wikipedia to be fundraising money illegally with their global donations based system, due to Finnish laws: https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-7144745
I don't think it's a worthwhile risk to take for Finnish open source developers to accept donations and think it won't be considered illegal by the authorities.
I have been running an open source MathJax-based mathematics pastebin[1] since 2012 and I had received 2 donations for it until recently. Then a mathematician tweeted[2] about it convincing others to send some donations. After that kind gesture by him, I received 3 more donations. So pretty sure I can't make a living out of donations. :-) But I still appreciate them because they help in covering a portion of the host…
What kind of legal notices are you routinely dealing with? That's a frightening aspect of maintaining an open source side project I hadn't really considered.
The notices are usually takedown notices to remove content violating various regulations that spammers often post to the website. This issue occurs if my spam filter or I do not detect and remove such content before someone else finds it and submits a complaint about it.
In my experience, this additional overhead comes with hosting a live service that allows user-generated content. Other types of projects where the tool is run offline or where the users take the tool and host it themselves are fine.
I have been running an open source MathJax-based mathematics pastebin[1] since 2012 and I had received 2 donations for it until recently. Then a mathematician tweeted[2] about it convincing others to send some donations. After that kind gesture by him, I received 3 more donations. So pretty sure I can't make a living out of donations. :-) But I still appreciate them because they help in covering a portion of the host…
I'm stupid , but what exactly do mathematicians do ? I'd assume economists are a significant portion of them ???
NSA is one of the largest employers of mathematicians. They look for flaws in crypto implementations.
Giving? No. Receiving and not reporting? Maybe, depending on local laws and how zealous the tax enforcer is. This probably falls into the category of "Not allowed, but too small to worry about." That works fine, until they decide to audit you for some other reason.
Sorry, I misread your original comment. Sure, if the project is successful to the point of receiving significant amounts, having to report it becomes mandatory. Speaking as someone with an open source project that started due a grant and that I'd love to turn into a full time job: If I were receiving so many donations that it would require me to spend time to report to the tax authorities, I'd put it on the list of "…
Obviously it depends which tax system(s) you have to deal with, but in some countries if you are fortunate to already earn over the tax free allowance from your day job, it doesn't matter how big or small the extra (donation) income is from your side-project - it will be mandatory to report it. So you can either comply, which has a cost, or not comply and risk whatever comes from that.
I know this feeling, seeing people pay for your free software! It's very rewarding, and also a sign that some people got huge value from your hard work. Even if it's symbolic, or just enough to cover the server costs, it's what motivates me to continue. Still, I wish more companies would donate to support the massive amount of open-source software and libraries we all use every day. I understand that making a company…
> I understand that making a company pay for something free is a challenge. I don't know how many times I've heard variants of this. "You can't monetize open source because companies won't pay for it." It's not that hard to get them to support the project if you sell something that's not available for free. It could be as simple as selling a special version of the documentation for $25. That's obviously not at the sa…
I totally agree. It's probably easier to make a company pay by offering support, training, etc.
It's the donation schema that is complicated for them.