[Nix-dev] Packaging free software that costs money

[Moritz Bartl]

On 07/06/2016 03:32 PM, Profpatsch wrote:
> On 16-07-06 10:16pm, Roger Qiu wrote:
>> I've been thinking about the mechanics of FOSS app stores. If you don't want
>> to handle the payments, you need to implement a kind of
>> payment-authentication, where the principle is the same as dealing with
>> private packages. Instead the key being used is a key that is derived from a
>> successful payment.
> A friend of mine might be onto something there, but it’s probably
> still too early to tell.

The short story is that we've been working on setting up a hybrid
company that can "host" open source projects. Hybrid, in the sense that
it will be able to both process donations (charitable, non-profit), as
well as sales (commercial). The idea is to eventually scale to thousands
of little projects, but at the beginning we're focusing on some bigger
eggs. The idea is that you run your project, and we provide services to
handle financial issues, with a web interface for teams. Donor and
grants management, payroll, reimbursement, etc. Much like Software
Freedom Conservancy but built for larger scale, and based in Europe.

If this sounds interesting, we have some preliminary documentation
online which I'm happy to share a link to off-list. Please do not
publicly spread it just yet on mailing lists or Twitter or the like, but
it's fine to pass along to other interested individuals.

Moritz