Re:Need a middleman for FOSS donations (Score 1)

FOSS should have an org. that acts as a middleman for donations, tax issues, and foundation compliance. Make a donation to the org (hereafter MITM) on behalf of the software project, similar to Kickstarter but without the projects needing to join or setup a page. MITM can let accounts build-up until it's worth dealing with, find and verify the contributors, then help them with taxes or setting-up a foundation. MITM could also have donation clauses that let them change donations from dead projects to other similar ones, or maybe donations could be restricted by license, or by estimated number of users, etc...

I'd suggest GNU to take this on, but I don't think they'd be pragmatic enough.

A FOSS middleman would be great. Personally I heavily depend on at least 3 dozen free apps and websites throughout the year these days. I don't want them to go away so I'd like an easy way to support them all. We can't really expect everyone to donate $10 to each one. But if there was a fast and easy way to donate $1 to $3 to each one then many more users would donate and more people would share in supporting open source developers. And if such service only charged a very small fee to recipient regardless of the amount donated that would be even better.

I strongly believe that FOSS should be supported through small donations by the people that use it. I created a mobile and online donations startup called TikiPal.com that is founded on this principle. It's in early development now and we could use wkaan's 20K to spend on improving our site and app and adding important functionality (And modernize the look! Currently it's a working demo in progress and not ready for public consumption). Think of it as 20K being spent to eventually support thousands of worthy FOSS projects, rather than just four.

Tiki-Geoff