Handling Donations

[Joe]

Research needed:

I may have found a partial solution for what to do with monetary
donations! Opire https://opire.dev integrates with GitHub. It allows
anyone to place a bounty on a deliverable and for a developer to claim
it. Transactions are directly between the funder and the developer, so
our project is not directly involved and so has no financial
consequences to deal with.

These bounties expire after a set period and the funds are returned to
the donator if the bounty is not renewed.

All of this has to be verified and we have to figure out exactly how to
use it. Then we can install it and document its intended use.

I do not have time to research this.

We get infrequently get donation  requests and this could put them to
work. I have no illusions about this funding major efforts, but
something is better than nothing.

Joe

[David King]

Hey Joe.  I read through Opire's doc and maybe I didn't understand it
the way you seem to describe it.  There's no concept of escrowing reward
money and releasing it when conditions are met.  As far as I can tell,
rewards are offered and paid out on the honor system.  When a developer
closes a project issue with a pull request, then the person who offered
the reward is prompted to pay the reward, with a 4% fee added on top
going to Opire for being such nice people.  There's no discussion I
could find of what happens if the person who offered the reward turns
out to be a deadbeat.

You could start using Opire in the Autokey project without installing
anything at all.  I just went to Opire's web site and offered a $20
reward to anyone who closes the Autokey Wayland support issue (#87).  If
somebody ever creates a pull request in the Autokey project that
addresses that issue they can claim the reward and Opire will prompt me
to pay them the $20.  ($20 is the minimum reward amount Opire allows,
BTW.)  Multiple other people could stack up rewards on that same issue
in order to increase the likelyhood that someone would pick it up and
work on it.

If you really want to install something, Opire does offer a bot that can
be added to the project so that rewards can be created directly on the
issue's Github page without signing into the Opire web site but that is
optional.  If you want to see how that bot works you can see it in
action in the the issue I just opened on the Opire Github asking some
questions -> https://github.com/Opire/docs/issues/19  (Look for the
"This repo is using Opire" twisty and click it.)

They pay out rewards to the developers via Stripe.  Stripe is primarily
a credit chard processor for small business and they charge merchant
fees per transaction that vary based on the type of transaction. I'm
assuming, and I asked to confirm in my Github issue, that developers
would need to pay these fees -> https://stripe.com/pricing.

Looks like the major issues here aren't technical, but will rather be
educating the community and finding developers who want to put in the
work necessary to collect the rewards offered.

Hope this helps save you a little research time ...

Dave

--

David King
dave at daveking dot com

[David King]

Opire answered the questions I posed in the issue I posted to their
Github.  Here's what they said:

What happens if the person who offers the reward turns out to be a
deadbeat and refuses to pay?

We have a FAQ in our docs with a similar question ("What if I don't
get paid") -> https://docs.opire.dev/faq

But basically, it's a matter of trust in the community. We have our
ways to detect unethical behaviour (systematically creating rewards
without paying them), in which case we'll block the capability for
creating new ones until they start paying the devs.

However, we haven't detected such behaviour yet. If in the future it
starts to become a problem and our current mechanisms are not
enough, we'll investigate further actions.

Stripe charges different fees for different types of transactions. How
are your payments made? As credit card payments? As ACH transfers?
Something else?

We use Stripe Checkout to offer a secure payment gateway to the
rewards creators. Stripe automatically offers different payment
methods based on variables like IP, country, etc. That way, creators
can pay with any payment method they prefer (as long as it's offered
by Stripe in their checkout session). At the moment, most payments
are being done by card.

We pay developers by making a direct transfer to their Stripe
account, using the payment of the creator as the source for the
transaction. We only receive our fee, and the Stripe fee that the
creator paid (and will be deducted by Stripe directly in our account).

It's a system we had to setup with a lot of different variables in
mind; the goal being that the developer always receive the 100% of
the reward. The rest is taken care by Opire & the reward creator.

How can I know that you'll be around for the long term? I need to have
confidence before I spend the time and effort necessary to train my
project's community to use your services. If you all were to disappear
in six months or a year I would have wasted a lot of precious time.

Fair question. Obviously we don't plan to disappear, but I would
also need some confidence / proof if I were in your place.

One of the key aspects of Opire is that we don't hold money.
Creating a reward is done without any money coming out of the user's
pocket. The only moment they have to pay, is when the developer has
solved the issue and they are claiming the reward. And the transfer
to the developer's Stripe account is done instantaneously once the
reward creator has made the payment.

So that's already a difference VS other alternatives like
Bountysource, that unfortunately disappeared some years ago and
caused that a lot of people lost their money. If Opire disappeared,
nobody loses their money.

Another thing: we have in our roadmap to completely being
open-source. Since we're trying to make an impact in the open-source
ecosystem, it make sense for us to have all our code accessible for
everybody.

Before completely going open-source, we wanted to clean-up the
house, release a few more functionalities that people have been
asking for, agree in a set of rules for collaborations, etc. But we
can prioritise it if it would make you more confident in Opire.

We're not going anywhere anytime soon. And if we do, the code will
be accesible for anyone - the only thing you would need to do is
self host the different services

On this point I would like to add one thing. I fully understand the
concern, especially as it's a platform with little track record. The
reality is that our costs are very low and even if we did not make
money with this project we could afford to keep the servers active
and continue offering our services. So I can assure you that we will
not disappear.

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