Comment by JoshTriplett
2 years ago
> One of the problems I found with this is that actually taking donations is hard work.
As many problems as there are with GitHub (social lock-in, Copilot laundering Open Source license violations), GitHub Sponsors is incredibly valuable and substantially reduces the friction for getting support for an Open Source project.
I don't think he is speaking about the ability to get donations. Rather about the tax consequences. It doesn't matter to governments how you got money, you have to declare it, even if it is GitHub Sponsors.
He did not say which country, but my guess would be Germany. You have to declare every penny here.
The last part of the post is about the difficulty of getting people to donate, which GitHub Sponsors helps with. The first part is about the tax consequences, which Sponsors still helps somewhat with: while you still have to pay the requisite tax, with GitHub Sponsors you have one source of income to declare, rather than many small ones, which often reduces the amount of paperwork.
I was thinking Spain, it describes the situation here perfectly.
As far as I can tell, the problem lies not with the payment processing, but rather with the bureaucracy around receiving money in OP's country of residence.