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Enable sponsorship on your repo #105
Description
With the recent attention, I'm sure plenty of people will be willing to donate a few dollars to help support you.
Please enable the "Sponsor" feature on your repo : https://docs.github.com/en/sponsors/sponsoring-open-source-contributors/sponsoring-an-open-source-contributor-through-github
Activity
gbraad commentedon Apr 10, 2024
and/or your profile.
ColinM9991 commentedon Apr 11, 2024
Agreed. Happy to contribute to offer some support.
deki23 commentedon Apr 17, 2024
official link about donations
I am not a legal expert, but perhaps someone is and can contribute on this?
ColinM9991 commentedon Apr 17, 2024
A quick search revealed the following - this contains relevant info
https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/14855
Mikaela/.github#2
CyberTailor commentedon May 3, 2024
Open Collective can be used as an umbrella entity for receiving donations
Zakru commentedon Jun 6, 2024
The Finnish money collection law, which is the source of pain here, defines money collection clearly and simply as the following:
Official translation (not legally binding):
Not a lawyer but I don't believe getting the money via another entity is excluded by any part of that definition. You must sell something, you cannot in any way ask people to give yourself or an arbitrary other entity money without them receiving anything in return. When it comes to what is considered selling, that is where my certainty comes to an end. Extrapolating from the statement from the police quoted by Mikaela, a product that is made available equally to those who haven't paid does not constitute valid compensation. Whether for example selling pre-built binaries is good enough is beyond me. I'd imagine that's a service that counts as compensation (as long as you don't also give binaries for free), but, again, IANAL.
What I've seen others mention, however, is that you can certainly sell consultation. That is, support, feature development, what not. Sell it as a service. Dual license, though that may be difficult in case you're developing an existing project with contributions from many people.
TL;DR: Don't ask for donations; sell a product or service.
7heMech commentedon Aug 8, 2024
What about Liberapay?
It allows people to pledge:
https://liberapay.com/on/github/Larhzu/
shreekumar3d commentedon Dec 4, 2024
I saw the text above about the Finnish law. Would it prevent you from accepting grants from an organization ?
There's a 1 million USD FLOSS/fund; they are inviting applications from projects that are in need of funding. Projects are funded between 10-100k, "no strings attached". They launched recently, in mid October. For this year, they have a focus on "systemically important" projects.'
To apply for funding, you will need to submit a funding.json "manifest" file in a specific format. The format of this file are defined here. Note that a lot of fields are optional. They also have a tool to validate the manifest. There is also a GUI to build the manifest. Once you have funding.json, you may just submit it here.
I spent some time looking at the projects that have already applied. Didn't see XZ Utils. Hoping this can be of some help. Let me know if you need any help creating funding.json; would be glad to help out on that!
Larhzu commentedon Dec 18, 2024
Thank you to everyone for the kind messages! I apologize for not replying in this thread before.
The peculiar law is about soliciting donations from the general public. GitHub Sponsors sounds like that. Applying for grants etc. is different because it isn't asking for money from the general public. Studying and understanding other (more boring) legal details is required still.
By the way, when linking to Finlex, use URLs that have
ajantasa(currently applicable law) instead ofalkup(original unpatched 1.0.0 version of the law for historians to read). With this law it currently doesn't make a big difference though.Thank you for informing me about FLOSS/fund. Another one I was told about is Sovereign Tech Fund.
I still haven't studied this topic in detail and thus I'm not able to comment much. It's also that this is a bit atypical project in sense that the essential core pieces are based on another project (LZMA SDK), although there is indeed a lot stuff to do with the parts around the core pieces.
Larhzu commentedon Jan 17, 2025
I spoke on the phone with the Finnish Gambling Administration at the National Police Board (in Finnish: Poliisihallituksen arpajaishallinto) in January 2025. The money collection act (rahankeräyslaki) applies when soliciting money from people (Finns and non-Finns) living in Finland. The law doesn't apply when soliciting money from non-Finns in other countries even if done by an individual Finnish citizen.
Using an English language website to ask for donations doesn't mean that one isn't possibly soliciting money from people in Finland. It might help if one clearly expresses that Finns and people in Finland must not donate. The interpretation might depend on if people from Finland are donating anyway and perhaps how big portion of the donations are from them.
If there is a technical limitation that prevents donations from Finland, then the situation is clear: the money collection act doesn't apply. This means that GitHub Sponsors would be fine if Finns could refuse sponsorship from Finland.
I have created an account on Liberapay which supports country blocking. I do not accept donations from Finns or people living in Finland.
kaipee commentedon Jan 18, 2025
Great! I've started the ball rolling with a small donation.
I'll close this ticket and consider it done as Donations are set up using your Liberapay account.
Zakru commentedon Jan 18, 2025
This is great. As someone who only found this thread due to interest in the same topic, thanks for actually taking the time to figure this out and reporting back.
Larhzu commentedon Jan 20, 2025
@kaipee: Thanks!
@Zakru: Thanks! The law itself feels unclear and the skimming some of the related texts (hallituksen esitys yms.) didn't help. There is information on the police website (Finnish, English) but I wasn't sure how it applies in this context. Perhaps they would add a new FAQ entry if a few people asked about the same topic.
Random thoughts:
Liberapay suggests using Stripe so I wanted to set it up. I abandoned it because Stripe asked for business details like what kind of products are being sold. Liberapay's Terms of Service section 1 paragraph 3 require that only donations are allowed, so selling something is prohibited (which of course is fine). I felt there's a contradiction somewhere but I may have misunderstood something. Anyway, things work still because Stripe isn't the only available payment processor on Liberapay.
I understand that intermediaries like Liberapay, GitHub Sponsors, Stripe etc. help when people or companies donate to many people and projects but it feels that they add some complexity too.
7heMech commentedon Jan 20, 2025
Hey,
Well, many churches use stripe for donations, and they even have tax cuts for nonprofits, so I don't see why it should be a problem.
mousadirksz commentedon Feb 28, 2026
Hi, just watched the veritasium docu about this. Thanks for your contribution.
Please let us know if you are able to receive bitcoin lightning.
7heMech commentedon Feb 28, 2026
I think he's only accepting donations on this platform because he had concerns about local laws about accepting donations: https://liberapay.com/Larhzu