[tav]

This is the exact thing that I've been working on for the last year and a half. The biggest hurdle is actually handling the flow of money.

Because, unlike say Kickstarter/Patreon, where the money goes to a single entity/person, open source collaborations tend to be distributed and dynamic. So you effectively need to build a payments company and handle all of the headache that goes along with it.

But, having said that, I very much believe that something like this is needed — and thus why I'm still persevering with the project. Happy to chat further if cperciva/others are interested.

[cperciva]

I think there are enough solo developers -- solo either because they're the only person working on a project, or because they're the only person working on a specific part of a project -- that this could be very useful even without the headache of splitting money between teams.

I agree that it would be good to be able to handle larger teams at some point, but it might be easier to figure out how to do that after seeing how people used a "solo developer" version of this.

[kevinr]

tav, have you looked at Stripe's Connect product (https://stripe.com/connect)? Stripe already is a payments company, and Connect is built to let you use it somewhat like your own payments company, to pay others. Lyft uses it to pay its drivers for example, who also tend to be distributed and dynamic.

(Disclaimer: I work for Stripe, as of like last week. :)

[tav]

Yes, that was actually the original plan. It all seemed so easy! Let developers connect their standalone Stripe accounts and have sponsors pay directly into those accounts. But this proved problematic for a few reasons, e.g.

* Most developers didn't want to handle matters like global VAT reporting individually, so ideally the money would flow through a central entity which took care of that for them so that they only have to deal with a single source of income.

* The need to support ad-hoc transfer of funds between standalone accounts when maintainers approved transfers to other developers they are collaborating with.

Stripe Connect with managed accounts helps to solve some of these issues, e.g. by creating charges on the platform account and then creating individual transfers to connected accounts. But according to https://stripe.com/docs/connect/charges-transfers:

"This approach is only fully supported when both your platform and the connected account are in the U.S. If your platform or the connected account is outside of the U.S., you can only use this approach for less than 10% of your total volume."

So, is there some other method that's available? Because right now, I'm looking at handling the payouts myself and using Stripe to handle just the incoming payment processing. And it'd be great to use Stripe for both instead!

(P.S. Congrats on the new job!)

[kevinr]

tav, I'm sorry for my delay getting back to you. I just sent you an email at your profile address to introduce you to someone on our New Business team, who may be able to help.

Open source funding is a cause near and dear to my heart, and I hope something is able to work out.

(And thanks!)