
Ask HN: Preferred Method of Funding OSS - el_open_ranch
There have been a few posts over the last couple of weeks around how OS Projects have asked for donations. Being someone whom is working on a newer foundation that is targeting OS projects to both help with maintinence, work and help raise funding I wanted to guage what people preferred as users.<p>I am in the camp of &quot;Get out of my terminal&quot; at the moment and think that there are better ways for open source projects to help raise <i>some</i> money in order to pay for their time.<p>Right now the best source of funding I see are programs like Open Collective and Patreon - Im not too sure how I feel about putting Ads in ReadMe&#x27;s - maybe a seperate document in the repo might be better - I think its fine to be on the main site of the project though ( if they have one )<p>So, what are your thoughts?
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quaquaqua1
A direct donation to the person(s) who create, maintain, and extend the
software you love to use.

There is no need in my mind for a platform to manage this or gamify it unless
things are very complex, I suppose.

In the USA, the IRS makes it pretty simple to report all of the transactions
received like this, so there isn't even a need to have a foundation or any
crazy legal structure.

The only bottleneck is that 99% of humans on this Earth seemingly do not feel
compelled to just simply send someone money as a "thank you".

So we have merch stores and Patreon and Kickstarter as a symptom of all this.

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luckylion
> There is no need in my mind for a platform to manage this or gamify it
> unless things are very complex, I suppose.

I'd prefer one platform just to make it easier to manage for me ("oof, my
payment method needs to change ... where did I use the old one?"), and it
would also help because you don't have each project spend time to set up their
own infrastructure, deal with payment processors about problems etc.

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quaquaqua1
I do agree with you but at least those problems only take hours to fix and not
days.

It is ironic that one of the best ways to send money to someone with a US bank
account or even just access to a US bank is a check. Sure, the bank is a
platform, but is a very robust and secure one compared to say, Paypal, Venmo,
Zelle, etc.

All you need to do is mail someone a check with their name on it. They can
then take a photo of it and deposit it into their bank. Everything is properly
there for taxation and reporting so that you can be an aboveboard citizen, and
you never have to worry about processing credit cards or chargebacks or
disputes. A check is basically trackable cash.

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wmf
[https://blog.licensezero.com/2019/08/24/Process-of-
Eliminati...](https://blog.licensezero.com/2019/08/24/Process-of-
Elimination.html)

