How do I donate funds to this project?

[drodri24]

I was wondering if monetary donations are accepted for this project. mpv is one of my favorite free software projects and I would like to show my appreciation by making a donation.

Thank you for all the hard work you all put into this project.

[ghost]

There's currently no way to do that.

[Akemi]

should we make an rfc out of this or close it?

[CounterPillow]

We've had a discussion on IRC about this before, with the conclusion that people were either too humble or too lazy to deal with tax implications. But the way forward would probably be GitHub Sponsors + a FUNDING file, as this way money gets doubled for the first year by Our Redmond Overlords, and there are no transaction costs.

Whether or not any individual developer should be added to the FUNDING file is a touchy subject that may lead to some spicy PRs. Many seem to not really feel like they do enough to be entitled to money (not going to namedrop anyone because that'd be rude to sfan5), so this is probably best a discussion that is had in a context where people feel comfortable talking about it.

Alternatively we can make it super transparent by saying a certain number of commits per month entitles you to be in that file, but then people may start to metagame the requirements by splitting things up into too many commits (or are afraid they may appear to be metagaming and not submit small PRs).

EDIT: Another option I just thought about is that we have a designated treasurer that manages a separate account for all donations, and developers can then take out of this fund if they need to cover an expense like multimedia-related travel, domain/hosting costs or hardware purchase. To do this "cleanly" one would need to register an actual non-profit for it, but through OpenCollective we can use a third party non-profit to manage the finances for us. This of course means paperwork whenever someone wants to be compensated for something. However it guarantees a very low amount of possible shadiness.

At the end of the day the question is how much money nonsense people want to get involved in for whatever donations the project may get.

[ghost]

We had this idea that donations could be used to buy booze for all of us.

[haasn]

That seems to run into the same question of defining who "all of us is". (Or did you have so much "fun" the last time you tried tracking down every single person who has ever contributed to mpv in some way, shape or form? :p)

[ghost]

Either some sort of physical meeting (don't come = no booze for you), or equivalent to amount of commit volume (might cause alcohol poisoning to some).

[Doofussy2]

Hahaha...you guys are funny. My two cents would be, restrict it to members (you guys drink the most, right?) Seriously though, I would like to donate too. You should find a way to make this work. I love what you guys do, and I would like to be able to show my appreciation.

[aeneas01]

count me in as someone who would also be more than happy to donate $ to the mpv cause!

[haasn]

For lack of a better suggestion, we could adopt the VideoLAN model:

1. Form an mpv association and clarify the rules needed to vote members into the association / vote members into positions
2. Vote/Assign somebody to the role of treasurer and have them be in charge of setting up donation channels and managing funds
3. Decide on how to spend this money in association meetings

My ideas include:

• organize some sort of meeting for mpv contributors, as a community bonding thing
• possibly organize some sort of panel at a FOSS event (FOSDEM?), if we find enough people willing to do that sort of thing (I am!)
• setting up some sort of feature bounty program for features we all agree are important but nobody wants to implement, or possibly a bug bounty program for certain types of bugs
• (possibly) buying hardware needed for testing purposes

Although @wm4 half-seriously suggested we'd just be a dictatorship with him in charge of everything, rather than a democracy/association. Either way would be fine by me.

[dardo82]

Is this going anywhere?

[CounterPillow]

I'm with haasn here that founding a legal entity of some sort would be great for mpv as a project. Among other things, we could finally have a trademark registration, and an account from which to pay for domains and reimburse contributors.

The problem here is that it requires some very boring and painful legal stuff which I'd imagine most people involved wouldn't want to go through voluntarily.

[dardo82]

Maybe we can pay them to incentivize doing it? ;-P

[dpriskorn]

I would also like to donate if possible. Would active contributors be willing to sign up in liberapay or something to avoid the overhead of an association?

[jyc]

I would also love to donate if possible!

[zutto]

Pitching a vote for liberaypay as well!