Re: [libreplanet-discuss] appreciation payment protocol

[Ramana Kumar]

On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 7:05 PM, John Sullivan <johns@fsf.org> wrote:

andrew@lewman.com writes:

> On Thu, 23 Aug 2012 18:19:39 +0100
> Ramana Kumar <ramana.kumar@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> TipTheWeb (http://tiptheweb.org/) looks like a promising Flattr
>
> And their terms of service are better than the crazy anti-customer
> flattr terms.

We've discussed providing this service at the FSF for free software
developers, but so far haven't been able to solve the problem of credit
card transaction fees, which are prohibitive on small transactions.

TipTheWeb solves this problem by letting you fund tips separately from making them.
It works like this:

1. You make a list of URLs you want to tip (this can be done automatically with buttons on websites etc.) and the amount you want to give.
2. People who own the stuff at those URLs claim their ownership somehow (e.g. with meta tags, dns records, authentication, ...)
3. You donate to TipTheWeb (with a large amount to make transaction fees bite less) - seems they only use PayPal at the moment, but that might change with enough pressure...
   
4. You mark your tips as "I want to pay these out now"
5. TipTheWeb at the end of the month distributes money to people who have claimed stuff based on the value of tips their stuff got.

These steps can happen in any order, except 5 which must happen last.

Google has a program where they will let nonprofits use Google Checkout
with no credit card transaction fees. However, their required agreement
includes a proprietary software license, and at least so far they
haven't wanted to change that (for everyone, not just as an exception
for us -- that would be a condition of our participation).

Any thoughts on how to make it work would be welcome. It's on my mind as
we expand the FSF's directed donations program
(<https://my.fsf.org/donate/directed-donations/working-together>).

What about something similar to the TTW model? Or just reuse their existing service?

I've sent email to TTW support asking whether they plan to make it easy to tip more publishing sites (where it's hard to claim the URL but you still push stuff, like github and youtube, which they already support) like gitorious, which are more appropriate for free software publishing. At worst one can always direct people to personal homepages and say "tip me at this URL".

 

-john

--
John Sullivan | Executive Director, Free Software Foundation
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