PSA: scrawl's Patreon

[K0kt409P]

Isn't that what is happening here? No one here is personally nor directly benefited by scrawl in sending him gifts/donations. He works on what wants to work on when he wants to, with no expectations. It is plain old "good will".

Well, I can only speak for myself here, but I certainly expect scrawl to use the money I donate to fund his work on free software, in one way or another. That is the express purpose of the patreon, after all:

With your support on Patreon, I could devote more time to working on these projects.

For the purposes of Swedish law, I do not have gåvoavsikt towards scrawl in this matter.

[DestinedToDie]

No one here is personally nor directly benefited by scrawl in sending him gifts/donations. He works on what wants to work on when he wants to, with no expectations. It is plain old "good will".

I'm not gifting money and I'm still getting to use the same software everyone else gets to use. Therefore it is not an exchange of money for software. What would be illegal is if Scrawl received untaxed donations in exchange for giving OpenMW updates to donatees only.

Of course, with the right angle you can pidgeon-hole everything to be taxable, even gifting money to homeless people so that they can buy food. After all, you are explicitly expecting them to buy food with that money so that you can in exchange feel like you've done something to help them. That's taxable right there.

By the way in reality the homeless guy doesn't have to buy food with that money. It is more likely that he will buy some alcohol and booze off. In our case, Scrawl doesn't even have to use that money to work on OpenMW. If he wants, he can just buy pizza and watch anime. No obligation.

[Chris]

But isn't the whole purpose of Patreon to give someone money on a monthly basis to produce content? What that content is is at the whim of the creator, and they may decide to make the content public or patron-exclusive, but there is the expectation to give something back if the creator wants to continue receiving money through the service.

[psi29a]

That is the intended purpose of Patreon, but that isn't how many people are using it.

They are aware of this and have even addressed it here:
https://patreon.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/ar ... -donation-

They even specifically call it a 'gift' and will eventually implement one-time gifts. For now, they recommend becoming a patron to make a donation then to remove your patronage. They themselves use the words donation and gifts.

[asmo]

But isn't the whole purpose of Patreon to give someone money on a monthly basis to produce content?

From https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?rid=29 ... =2.0&exp=1

$2.00+ per month
Insider

Access to my personal Trello board, where I organize my to-do list, among other things. You will be able to see what I'm currently working on in Almost Real Time (TM), as well as comment and vote on to-do items.

For me that includes OpenMW. And I actually appreciate that I can make him have more time for OpenMW.


Don't get me wrong, I'm really thinking of becoming a patreon - but regarding to the arguments in this thread, you can influence what Jannik is working on.

Apart from that, how much is the VAT? 23%? So if you donate 2 US$ it will be 2,46US$. For me that's not "enough" to make it a problem - of course it makes a difference when you donate 20 US$ or more...

[lysol]

About the trello thing. It's not that important for me since I think scrawl knows best what do do at the moment, but still, it would be nice to know how to access the trello page and vote. Cause I haven't figured out how to do that yet...

[ElderTroll]

With the upcoming release of 0.37 it would be good to link to scrawl's patreon account with a blurb about him. With the PR for the new release it's his best chance at meeting the funding goals.

Support a FOSS Developer
Scrawl works on free and open source software, particularly in the 3D graphics field. He's been one of the primary developers of the OpenMW project for 3+ years. Scrawl contributes to OpenSceneGraph, MyGUI and (formerly) Ogre3D, as well as whatever free software tools he is using. Find his contributions on his GitHub and OpenHub profiles.

[raevol]

Do we want to put that in the release announcement? It's probably the most publicized thing we do. Let me know the team's thoughts!

[Br0ken]

Do we want to put that in the release announcement? It's probably the most publicized thing we do. Let me know the team's thoughts!

So, anyone?
PS: Just sign up to Patreon.

[ElderTroll]

Hey everyone,

Glad to see scrawl's patreon on the front page, but can we get a small blurb to give visitors context. "He's an open source software contributor to many projects and one of our main developers for over 3 years.".