[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 are trying. Github has a bunch of new Sponsorship features. They have the audience.

Sites like https://www.libaries.io and 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 and 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 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/ and https://repology.org

[schafele]

Thanks a lot for all the helpful links and relevant questions. I agree, there is still a lot to clarify. I also see Recursive as a platform which could work together with other platforms. Recursive can't solve tax issues for the project owners but can be an additional source for donations which can then be received by any legal entity.