Comment by gnramires

> I live in a country completely unsuited to making money from a hobby project on the side. To take donations I'd need to register as self-employed, and pay monthly for social security as long as I'm registered, even if I make no revenue whatsoever in that month. That's an absolutely awful idea for a project just getting started. I'd be losing a very appreciable amount of money, regularly. It'd take lots of effort to have enough support that I'm back to zero, and still not making anything. This is because this is a system made for plumbers, not for people doing rare jobs on the side which might some day grow into something serious.

We need to keep in mind systems can be changed. You've set a very clear example that can be understood and communicated. Legislators should get to know this. Receiving donations for community work should be possible without hurdle (at least until it reaches a very high level) everywhere.

I call the idea that we spontaneously support what is right for all of us a Donation Economy. If most people are ethical, this would work well.

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Furthermore, I think we should also fight, in the long term, for organizations (collectively supported) that provide this function (supporting community work). Like pollution is a negative externality, where the act of someone is (an unpriced) bad for everyone, contributing to OSS is a positive externality, where the work of someone is (again unpriced) good for everyone. I propose creating distributed institutions for identifying and pricing those externalities (positive and negative), evaluating and rewarding (or pricing) them accordingly. What is the metric for externalities? Collective meaning and wellbeing of everyone.[1]

There are foundations like NLNet[2] that do this for OSS. I think we should donate to them in the meantime.

[1] More about this here: https://nlnet.nl/