
Show HN: Recursive Donations to support Open Source maintainers - schafele
https://recursive.gives/
======
rendx
How do you legally distribute financial contributions? Who will be eligible to
receive funding for work on a particular project? Who figures out the tax
issues across jurisdictions? How do you become a relevant site representing
such projects?

I am not saying it cannot be done. It definitely can, and the more options we
have the better. Sites like
[https://www.opencollective.com](https://www.opencollective.com) are trying.
Github has a bunch of new Sponsorship features. They have the audience.

Sites like [https://www.libaries.io](https://www.libaries.io) and
[https://www.repology.org](https://www.repology.org) are building dependency
graphs. There are other places which can help to identify the recursive
structure you are after.

Fiscal sponsorship entities like
[https://www.sfconservancy.org](https://www.sfconservancy.org) and
[https://www.techcultivation.org](https://www.techcultivation.org), apache.org
etc are trying to tackle some of the issues to legally represent projects (and
receive donations for them).

~~~
gingerlime
Thanks for the links. Very useful. As a company that relies on open-source and
wants to donate some (limited) money, we're facing a challenge. How do we
easily donate a fixed sum every year/month and make sure it goes to open-
source projects we depend on.

I tried [https://backyourstack.com](https://backyourstack.com) and uploaded
our Gemfile.lock (rubygems) to try to match it with opencollective projects.
It detected 249 dependencies but _zero_ projects that require funding on
opencollective :(

Do you have any advice on how to go about it? we really want to contribute
back, but it seems like an impossible task right now.

EDIT: btw both www.libraries.io and www.repology.org cannot resolve DNS for
me... are they gone?

~~~
schafele
Hey, exactly that problem do we want to solve! Good to hear that more people
want to donate but face this problem.

The links btw are: [https://libraries.io/](https://libraries.io/) and
[https://repology.org](https://repology.org)

------
schafele
Author here:

I know several people and also companies who would like to support Open Source
financially, but don’t know how to do it in a fair way. Usually, there is just
one approach, pick the most important library/project you depend on and donate
some money to them. I asked myself if there is a simple method to support more
maintainers with one donation, especially those who are further down the
dependency chain and, thus, lack visibility. If you want to donate, for
example, 100$ to 100 libraries, it is almost impossible to do it easily. You
have to investigate for every single project if they accept donations, what
platform they use for it, split the money, pay in the worst case 100 times
transaction fees (credit card, bank transfer fees), and finally initiate the
transactions.

I envision that you can donate on one platform and the donation is
transparently and automatically distributed to all maintainers your project
depends on. On the contributors’ side, this means that even if you are a small
library down the dependency chain and don’t usually get a lot of visibility,
you receive a small amount of the donation. I built a small mock up to
demonstrate how it could work ...
[https://recursive.gives](https://recursive.gives)

As there are a lot of Open Source enthusiasts here, I would like to know if
you think that it can work or if you have any other suggestion to tackle the
problem.

------
markuspoerschke
Why do the devDependencies gets less attention than the "normal" dependencies?

In my case, it does not matter if the dependency was added to "dev" or
"normal", because I just compile JavaScript and CSS to a minified version. All
dependencies are needed in the build process only.

I would recomment not to differentiate between runtime dependencies and dev
dependencies.

~~~
schafele
Usually, your runtime deps are still in your minified version and used during
runtime. But in general, it might be a good idea to offer this as an option to
the user how the money should be distributed.

