[greggirwin]

I replied to a few comments, and will post my own now.

For those questioning the FOSS-ness of Scarf. Start with Wikipedia, then read a few more things for background.

Scarf itself is BSD3 licensed. You can do whatever you want with it. Even fork it and remove all the things it was designed to do.

There is nothing not-FOSS about this project. The goal (and I'm not affiliated with it in any way, nor do I know the author) is to support FOSS developers. If you're a FOSS developer, you want that, right? And if you're not, do you know how at risk you are because FOSS devs are not compensated consistently and well? That's the message we need to get out. Projects like Scarf are important, and this is a new space, because we need to raise awarenes about this issue and solve it.

Will there be bad actors? You bet. Are there already bad actors? You bet. It's not about creating a perfect solution, but creating a better solution than what we have now. Which means creating any solution at all for this particular problem at this point in history.

For every project that acknowledges and addresses this problem, I applaud you. We need stepping stones.

[fragmede]

A customer who wants to get money to a FOSS developer, is hard enough for developers to manage. (One success of the Apple store is that it makes getting paid easy and is easily worth the cut off the top that they take.) The current state of the art is to drop a bitcoin address in the `Readme.md` and then customers just need to pay with bitcoin. Which to be real, is too high a bar for many a customer).

It's not the worst solution, either (not saying it's super great, mind you). For the developer, BTC has no server to sysadmin (btc miners are somebody else's problem). If you're a developer that's not in/near the US financial system, it can be very difficult to get paid (eg developer in the country of Georgia, Estonia, North Korea) (Never mind the legal/moral/political question, everyone want to get paid.)

[aviaviavi]

That's a good point about this not helping people who aren't near the US financial system, for now. I'm planning a feature for developers to be able to connect a crypto wallet that they could be payed out to. Package users could optionally pay with a cryptocurrency, or just with a credit card like you can now. The package developers should not need to deal with complexity like this.

[aviaviavi]

Very well stated :). Scarf is still very early on and not remotely perfect. But I hope that people will give it a try, we can iterate and iterate and see if we can get more towards an open source model that works better for everyone.