It may be a little early in the lifetime of the project, but I’m interested in how to render concrete financial support to the project (e.g. to support creation of a “source of truth” type binary cache, to support the distributed ones suggested in the forum topic Binary cache - thoughts, or to support the infrastructure SIG).
Is there an effort to set up a donation-receiving entity that can pay for infra stuff yet? Is that another committee/SIG?
This is something I have thought about, but things are still very early so we haven’t really had any movement or discussions surrounding it. I believe this would be something the steering committee should take care of when it becomes necessary (likely within the next ~2 months).
I was having the same thought! Funding would ideally be done in a manner that allows showing how much goes where. And it would be great if the money donated doesn’t lose 30% of its value or something by being converted to USD from Euros or some other currency
OpenCollective seems nice for tracking expenditures, but I honestly do not understand what in the world is going on there with the “open collective” and “open collective foundation” cutting ties.
No idea if patreon, liberapay, or “buy me a coffee” track expenditures, but having all of them might not hurt + crypto donations like monero.
The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced the auxolotl project might require a non-profit foundation in the future.
I’ve dug through OpenCollective quite a bit and it could be fitting for the current situation. It allows “Initiatives” that do not yet have a legal structure (and therefore no access to bank/ money transfers) to access these services through “Fiscal Hosts”. They typically take a little cut, but there’s a range of choices.
The Fiscal Hosts collects and holds the money and reimburses expenses based on invoices. There’s approval processes and you can organize your donation process through the platform too.
OC as a “company” (not sure what their correct legal state is) seems to aim at community health and is trying to achieve an Exit2Community eventually.
But with anything that involves money: There are some rules to follow since all the weirdo money laundering laws are unavoidable.
AFAIK, Open Collective is the company that develops the software whereas the Open Collective Foundation was an associated/affiliated (started by a lot of the same people but still completely separate) non-profit that used the software to act as a fiscal host but couldn’t keep their doors open for reasons that I can’t remember right now. There are other fiscal hosts that use the Open Collective software.