[Distutils] Contributing money to package authors/maintainers via PyPI

[Nick Coghlan]

On 24 July 2016 at 04:40, Nicholas Chammas <nicholas.chammas at gmail.com> wrote:
> This may be a heretical idea, and it’s definitely not something anyone is
> likely to take on anytime soon, but I’d like to put it up for discussion and
> see what people think.

The PSF wouldn't want to get involved in the actual money transfer
(facilitating international monetary transfers is complicated at the
best of times, facilitating them without jeopardising the PSF's public
interest charity status would be even worse), but one of the things
I'd personally like to see happen post Warehouse migration is along
the lines of what Nathaniel Smith suggested: we could adjust the
publisher facing UX to explicitly nudge people towards explaining how
ongoing development of their project is funded, and make it not only
acceptable, but encouraged, for people to engage in fundraising
activities on their project pages. The public project pages would then
include that sustainability information, and we'd also make it
available as part of the project metadata available through the
service API.

It would then be up to publishers to decide if and how how they wanted
to seek funds (PayPal, Patreon, Gratipay, BountySource Salt, etc),
rather than the PyPA or the PSF making that decision on their behalf.
(However, we could also consider being open to code contributions from
those kinds of companies that made it easy for publishers to integrate
their services with PyPI)

If folks publishing software through PyPI didn't personally want or
need additional funds (e.g. when it's a fully funded institutional
project, or if it's someone's personal side project that they have no
interest in turning into a paid job), then we could let them opt in to
using the relevant space on the project page to display the logo(s) of
the sponsoring institution(s), encourage contributions to the PSF, or
leave it blank entirely.

Cheers,
Nick.

P.S. As far as RubyTogether goes, that's closer to what the PSF is
doing with the Packaging Working Group - providing a centrally
administered shared funding pool for sustaining engineering on common
community infrastructure. The Python equivalent to that is now for
organisations to either sign up as PSF Sponsors (or at least explain
to the PSF what they would like to see in improved expenditure
reporting before they would sign up as sponsors), or else to make an
earmarked donation specifically to the community packaging
infrastructure via https://donate.pypi.io/

It's not the same process or problem as the "help Python project users
to effectively manage their supply chain by providing them with ways
to fund Python project publishers"

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia