[nevernude]

StackAid founder here. There are a couple of questions that keep coming up that I thought I would address in one place.

- People don't want to give money to Stripe, Meta, etc since their projects are already well funded by corporations. We agree! Right now, those projects can just not claim their funds which would then be reallocated, or they can pass their funds on to their dependencies instead. We are exploring other ways to allow you to exempt certain organizations/repositories from being funded.

- People will try and game the system. They can try but they largely will not succeed because ultimately many developers will still need to be convinced to use and depend on their projects. How funds are allocated and what dependencies an open source project has is public knowledge and the community will rightly punish bad actors.

Thanks for all the responses and feedback.

[rendaw]

Hey, I think this is amazing! I think this has the power to transform open source development/funding in a good way.

I have one question from the main page - it says you sign up for a subscription and list _your_ dependencies. Does that mean for an individual (non open source maintainer) you pose as a project and donate to your own project? It's not clear how this works as a contributor. Do I subscribe to projects, at a mininum of $15 per project? (Also does the project you're donating to itself get any money? Or is it 100% split among dependencies?)

I echo the sentiment about manual allocation though. There are critical project dependencies, and there are things employed in an edge feature that devs might and could be replaced at any time, and all the way between.

Right now people already have the ability to control funding - just don't use StackAid and only donate projects you feel are critical. Or they may decide to explicitly remove dependencies below some threshold. Both of these hurt the long tail. And it feels manipulative - people should have the end say in how their money is donated.

Not all projects need money too. For instance, maybe project X requires a lot of manual work (curation of country/timezone datasets) and its developers no longer have time to do it on top of their day job, vs a library that's just an interface for a standard. Or maybe the devs of project Y are in an area hit by disaster and you want to increase funding to them for a while.

Also, aren't bad actors _because_ of the automatic allocation? The current entirely manual allocation system doesn't really have issues of this sort.

That said, I'll probably sign up for this, but if you added some options for finer control I'd be singing praises high and low.

[rendaw]

Okay, thinking about this more I think the automatic allocation might be a reasonable.

I think there's the risk of allocation getting out of drift with a project as the project evolves. Both from a sign up perspective and "if this requires hand tweaking, people will forget to do it" perspective having this low touch is probably important.

If there's manual allocations any automatic adjustments will affect existing allocations

[nevernude]

To answer your first question, you give StackAid access to repositories that you own (private or public) and we discover the dependencies you use automatically. Those dependencies are what is funded by your monthly subscription. Let's say you give us access to 4 different repositories with a total of 50 dependencies, then your subscription is divided equally among them. Hope that's helpful.

[rendaw]

So is this _only_ for developers, paying other developers? Can users donate to projects? What if you don't have any projects?

[dcow]

I just want to offer a word of support: I really like your solution! Don't get too hung up on HN curmudgeons "unable to use this product" because it does not work exactly the way they want to every last detail. There's more to this than making darn sure `aws-sdk` doesn't see a cent of your money...

You've found a need and you are addressing it. You've been thinking about this problem far longer than the drive by dissenters. You've run simulations and built the solution. Of course listen to the feedback, but don't let impact your trajectory unduly.

Personally, I find the emergent ecosystem of an egalitarian solution like this pretty fascinating. I'm totally on board. You've sold me and all you have is a waitlist. Take my card. I want to stop being the problem and actually participate in the solution (:

[rendaw]

Also, I can't find any information about StackAid itself on the site. What country is it in (physical address or physical contact information?) What's the legal status? Right now it's totally anonymous which seems sketchy since its dealing with money.

How are taxes handled? How is money stored and transferred? What risks are there here?

[nevernude]

Hey, we are located in the US based in Seattle and San Francisco and incorporated as an LLC. Our other founder has more of a social media[1] presence if that's helpful.

We use Stripe to process credit card payments as well as to pay out funds to projects that claim their funds. US based recipients who receive above a certain amount of money will be required to give the required information for 1099 income.

1. https://twitter.com/dudley, https://www.linkedin.com/in/dudleycarr, https://www.linkedin.com/in/wescarr

[oefrha]

> They can try but they largely will not succeed

Whether they succeed or not, it this takes off it creates a big incentive towards adding your own crap dependency to successful projects, that is to say, more garbage PRs (some better disguised than others). It’s like the Hacktoberfest disaster. The only difference is this has a tangible upside, the question is whether is outweighs the downside (quite likely in the taking off scenario), whereas Hacktoberfest is strictly negative value-add in my experience.

[nevernude]

There is another, opposite incentive at play which is to reduce the number of dependencies you have so that you receive more funding.