Replicant

I emailed the fsf about this, and they said that changing the form on their site wasn't possible at this time. They suggested that people who comment on the Replicant issue tracker could indicate that they have donated, and how much, to a particular issue/feature. Not ideal, but it might be ok if it is formalized in some way. Is there a treasurer for the project?

shuckle fisher wrote:

Is there a treasurer for the project?

AFAIK, the "treasurer" is the FSF itself, as money gets donated to Replicant through the FSF, which receives and holds the money, until someone on behalf of the Replicant project asks them for funds.
If I recall correctly, the FSF has a specific policy for releasing funds to the Replicant project, and requests for funds must be compliant to that policy.
I don't know what the policy is, though.

Also, If I recall correctly, RMS told me once that Replicant maintainers aren't directly aware of single donations, and they possibly don't know the total amount of money that has been donated, as everything is managed by the FSF, and maintainers only ask for funds when they need them.

I could be wrong in some of the things I remembered above, but all the same, I second this request for a clarification and formalization of the way donations are managed.

Lately I have been donating to the project at the end of the month via the FSF link above. From now on when I do this, I'll post a comment onto the feature/issue I'm interested in saying that I "donated" to that particular issue.

I'm not a developer, so I can only infer what I think would be most beneficial to the project's overall success. It might be nice to have urgency vs difficulty estimates somewhere on the issue tracker to help donations get pointed in the right direction :)

We should probably talk about this issue some more since we have at least two issues now that have bounties attached to them:

https://redmine.replicant.us/issues/1843
https://redmine.replicant.us/issues/1539

Here's a few things I think we should decide very soon:

0) Are we all on board with the bounty system donation method that shuckle fisher said the FSF proposed? If so, we should formally articulate the fact that we are taking bounty donations and put something on our wiki or main page about it.

1) Do we want to limit the list of bugs / feature requests that can accept bounty donations, or allow donors to donate to any bug / feature request that is on our tracker? It'd be unfortunate for people to add a bounty to a particular issue that, for technical reasons, is never able to be resolved.

2) How do we verify that the FSF actually got a donation when a user posts on our redmine that they made the donation? It would be unfortunate for a developer to work on an issue because they are expecting a certain dollar amount paid to them upon completion, only to later find out that the money isn't actually available. So, would it be good to have core Replicant contributors verify donations as they come in? If so, would we have to consistently reach out to the FSF when we see that a bounty donation came in?

The agreement that Replicant signed with the FSF says, "no donations containing donor imposed restrictions will be accepted by FSF pursuant to this Agreement." In order for us to have a formal bounty system we would have to get the FSF to agree to an amendment to this agreement. https://redmine.replicant.us/attachments/download/1600/fsf-replicant-sponsorship-agreement.pdf

there was a refresh on this discussion and how DAOs idea could help on such bouty system becoming trully financially sustainable. GVRN and DiEM25 tech.sov collective seam could cooperating bodies on this.