Enable sponsorship on your repo

[kaipee]

With the recent attention, I'm sure plenty of people will be willing to donate a few dollars to help support you.

Please enable the "Sponsor" feature on your repo : https://docs.github.com/en/sponsors/sponsoring-open-source-contributors/sponsoring-an-open-source-contributor-through-github

[gbraad]

and/or your profile.

[ColinM9991]

Agreed. Happy to contribute to offer some support.

[deki23]

official link about donations

A few have suggested that I should enable GitHub Sponsors.

The Finnish law doesn’t allow a private person to request money from the general public and give nothing in return. Certain types of organizations can ask for donations but to do that even they need to get a permit first.

This means that things like GitHub Sponsors don’t seem legal to use.

I am not a legal expert, but perhaps someone is and can contribute on this?

[ColinM9991]

official link about donations

A few have suggested that I should enable GitHub Sponsors.
The Finnish law doesn’t allow a private person to request money from the general public and give nothing in return. Certain types of organizations can ask for donations but to do that even they need to get a permit first.
This means that things like GitHub Sponsors don’t seem legal to use.

I am not a legal expert, but perhaps someone is and can contribute on this?

A quick search revealed the following - this contains relevant info

https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/14855

Mikaela/.github#2

[CyberTailor]

Open Collective can be used as an umbrella entity for receiving donations

[Zakru]

Open Collective can be used as an umbrella entity for receiving donations

The Finnish money collection law, which is the source of pain here, defines money collection clearly and simply as the following:

Tässä laissa tarkoitetaan:

1) rahankeräyksellä toimintaa, jossa yleisöön vetoamalla kerätään vastikkeetta rahaa;

Official translation (not legally binding):

1. money collection means activities in which funds are collected without compensation by appealing
   to the public;

Not a lawyer but I don't believe getting the money via another entity is excluded by any part of that definition. You must sell something, you cannot in any way ask people to give yourself or an arbitrary other entity money without them receiving anything in return. When it comes to what is considered selling, that is where my certainty comes to an end. Extrapolating from the statement from the police quoted by Mikaela, a product that is made available equally to those who haven't paid does not constitute valid compensation. Whether for example selling pre-built binaries is good enough is beyond me. I'd imagine that's a service that counts as compensation (as long as you don't also give binaries for free), but, again, IANAL.

What I've seen others mention, however, is that you can certainly sell consultation. That is, support, feature development, what not. Sell it as a service. Dual license, though that may be difficult in case you're developing an existing project with contributions from many people.

TL;DR: Don't ask for donations; sell a product or service.

[7heMech]

What about Liberapay?

It allows people to pledge:
https://liberapay.com/on/github/Larhzu/

[shreekumar3d]

I saw the text above about the Finnish law. Would it prevent you from accepting grants from an organization ?

There's a 1 million USD FLOSS/fund; they are inviting applications from projects that are in need of funding. Projects are funded between 10-100k, "no strings attached". They launched recently, in mid October. For this year, they have a focus on "systemically important" projects.'

To apply for funding, you will need to submit a funding.json "manifest" file in a specific format. The format of this file are defined here. Note that a lot of fields are optional. They also have a tool to validate the manifest. There is also a GUI to build the manifest. Once you have funding.json, you may just submit it here.

I spent some time looking at the projects that have already applied. Didn't see XZ Utils. Hoping this can be of some help. Let me know if you need any help creating funding.json; would be glad to help out on that!