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I was curious about [5] The link to support requests (which is a great piece of software) is here: https://cash.app/$KennethReitz https://cash.app/$KennethRei

I was curious about [5] The link to support requests (which is a great piece of software) is here: https://cash.app/$KennethReitz https://cash.app/$KennethReitz Note: This is NOT a charitable donation, it is a gift to an individual. These are not tax deductible under US law. Njs has a long attacking blog post saying this needs to go through PSF (huh?) and that they should be getting most of this money not the person the funds were directed towards (it's not clear how much they've actually contributed to requests over time). This supposedly also may trigger folks who have also suffered from "gaslighting". Supporting the developer of a piece of software does not, as far as I know, require that they sign up to handle it on a charitable basis. A big todo is made about the "large" amount raised. The amounts is 33K. To be frank, this is almost zero in tech land at least in the bay area and requests is a very highly used project. I was literally expecting something like 300K or even $1M - silly kickstarter projects raise for more and deliver nothing. Requests has already delivered a lot of utility. Just a bit of perspective from someone who wasn't familiar with this "fiasco".

sbierwagen 7y ago
It's always amazing how adding a little money to the mix makes people lose their minds. NJS was working for free. KR raised some money from large businesses, then told NJS to keep working for free. NJS retroactively discovered that working for free is stupid, and tried demanding all the money NJS raised. This didn't happen, of course, since he had no leverage at all on NJS besides complaining online. The takeaway here appears to be "never work for free". If NJS has worked on his own project, controlled by him alone, this wouldn't have happened. If you donate a bunch of work to an open source project, then... well... the source is open.
- privateSFacct 7y ago
  Where did KR say he was going to hire NJS or give him any money? NJS is not even on the contributor list for requests I don't think - so of all the people to hire is he even at the top of queue? And is it impossible that KR is doing an order of magnitude more work on the requests projects, with a much longer track records and raised the money directly to himself (and so has to pay taxes potentially on it) such that using it to support his work on requests is unreasonable?
pmiller2 7y ago
I wouldn’t say 33k is “almost zero.” For me, a single person living in the Bay Area, $33k would pay all of my expenses for a little over 6 months. When we’re talking about this amount of money going to a single individual, I don’t think it’s fair to call it “almost zero.”
- bonzini 7y ago
  I suppose you would have to pay taxes on the 33k you get from a crowdfunding platform.
  - privateSFacct 7y ago
    You would - yes, it's considered income and you may get a 1099-K even if no 1099-MISC in many cases. The 1099-K's have caught a fair number of folks not reporting income they otherwise were getting.
shkkmo 7y ago
I don't have a horse in the game and I'm not familiar with these people or the "fiasco" but your summary does not seem like accurate description of the issues raised in [5]. Here are the quotes that give me a very different take on the situation: The money was raised specifically to support development of requests 3 > [Reitz] announced that work had begun on "Requests 3", that its headline feature would be the native async/await support I was working on, and that he was seeking donations to make this happen. It's not so much that PSF needed to be used, as that there needed to be some accountability as to how those funds were used. > [Reitz] chose a fundraiser structure that avoids standard accountability mechanisms he was familiar with. He never had any plan or capability to deliver what he promised. And when I offered a way for him to do it anyway, he gave me some bafflegab about how expensive it is to write docs. Effectively, his public promises about how he would use the Requests 3 money were lies from start to finish, and he hasn't shown any remorse or even understanding that this is a problem. It sounds like a great deal of the work being done on requests is done by volunteers but the funding only goes to support Reitz > I think a lot of people don't realize how little Reitz actually has to do with Requests development. For many years now, actual maintenance has been done almost exclusively by other volunteers. If you look at the maintainers list on PyPI, you'll see he doesn't have PyPI rights to his own project, because he kept breaking stuff, so the real maintainers insisted on revoking his access. If you clone the Requests git repo, you can run git log requests/ to see a list of every time someone changed the library's source code, either directly or by merging someone else's pull request. The last time Reitz did either was in May 2017, when he made some whitespace cleanups. The issue is not so much that money is being made, but the way that it is done and the lack of accountability > I don't have any objection to trying to make money from open-source. I've written before about how open-source doesn't get nearly enough investment. I do object to exploiting volunteers, driving out community members, and lying to funders and the broader community. Reitz has a consistent history of doing all these things.
- privateSFacct 7y ago
  The people who can and should complain if they feel misled about how their money was used are the people who donated the money. Have any of them complained? I say this with some seriousness. NO WHERE that I can see did Reitz say he would hire NJS to do some work. Is Reitz even setup properly to report for taxes or withold taxes on amounts paid to NJS, check paperwork for work eligiblity etc? Would this even be allowable if requests is not a business, or would deductions be disallowed as non business (ie, a payment to NJS -> subject to tax to both Reitz and NJS potentially?). If you as a donor want full charitable compliance using PSF you would ask to give through them - and perhaps more would have been given if PSF had been an option. I don't even see NJS on the requests contributor list: https://github.com/psf/requests/blob/master/AUTHORS.rst https://github.com/psf/requests/blob/master/AUTHORS.rst Finally, requests 3 has a number of features.

sbierwagen 7y ago

It's always amazing how adding a little money to the mix makes people lose their minds. NJS was working for free. KR raised some money from large businesses, then told NJS to keep working for free. NJS retroactively discovered that working for free is stupid, and tried demanding all the money NJS raised. This didn't happen, of course, since he had no leverage at all on NJS besides complaining online. The takeaway here appears to be "never work for free". If NJS has worked on his own project, controlled by him alone, this wouldn't have happened. If you donate a bunch of work to an open source project, then... well... the source is open.

privateSFacct 7y ago
Where did KR say he was going to hire NJS or give him any money? NJS is not even on the contributor list for requests I don't think - so of all the people to hire is he even at the top of queue? And is it impossible that KR is doing an order of magnitude more work on the requests projects, with a much longer track records and raised the money directly to himself (and so has to pay taxes potentially on it) such that using it to support his work on requests is unreasonable?

pmiller2 7y ago

I wouldn’t say 33k is “almost zero.” For me, a single person living in the Bay Area, $33k would pay all of my expenses for a little over 6 months. When we’re talking about this amount of money going to a single individual, I don’t think it’s fair to call it “almost zero.”

bonzini 7y ago
I suppose you would have to pay taxes on the 33k you get from a crowdfunding platform.
- privateSFacct 7y ago
  You would - yes, it's considered income and you may get a 1099-K even if no 1099-MISC in many cases. The 1099-K's have caught a fair number of folks not reporting income they otherwise were getting.

shkkmo 7y ago

I don't have a horse in the game and I'm not familiar with these people or the "fiasco" but your summary does not seem like accurate description of the issues raised in [5]. Here are the quotes that give me a very different take on the situation: The money was raised specifically to support development of requests 3 > [Reitz] announced that work had begun on "Requests 3", that its headline feature would be the native async/await support I was working on, and that he was seeking donations to make this happen. It's not so much that PSF needed to be used, as that there needed to be some accountability as to how those funds were used. > [Reitz] chose a fundraiser structure that avoids standard accountability mechanisms he was familiar with. He never had any plan or capability to deliver what he promised. And when I offered a way for him to do it anyway, he gave me some bafflegab about how expensive it is to write docs. Effectively, his public promises about how he would use the Requests 3 money were lies from start to finish, and he hasn't shown any remorse or even understanding that this is a problem. It sounds like a great deal of the work being done on requests is done by volunteers but the funding only goes to support Reitz > I think a lot of people don't realize how little Reitz actually has to do with Requests development. For many years now, actual maintenance has been done almost exclusively by other volunteers. If you look at the maintainers list on PyPI, you'll see he doesn't have PyPI rights to his own project, because he kept breaking stuff, so the real maintainers insisted on revoking his access. If you clone the Requests git repo, you can run git log requests/ to see a list of every time someone changed the library's source code, either directly or by merging someone else's pull request. The last time Reitz did either was in May 2017, when he made some whitespace cleanups. The issue is not so much that money is being made, but the way that it is done and the lack of accountability > I don't have any objection to trying to make money from open-source. I've written before about how open-source doesn't get nearly enough investment. I do object to exploiting volunteers, driving out community members, and lying to funders and the broader community. Reitz has a consistent history of doing all these things.

privateSFacct 7y ago
The people who can and should complain if they feel misled about how their money was used are the people who donated the money. Have any of them complained? I say this with some seriousness. NO WHERE that I can see did Reitz say he would hire NJS to do some work. Is Reitz even setup properly to report for taxes or withold taxes on amounts paid to NJS, check paperwork for work eligiblity etc? Would this even be allowable if requests is not a business, or would deductions be disallowed as non business (ie, a payment to NJS -> subject to tax to both Reitz and NJS potentially?). If you as a donor want full charitable compliance using PSF you would ask to give through them - and perhaps more would have been given if PSF had been an option. I don't even see NJS on the requests contributor list: https://github.com/psf/requests/blob/master/AUTHORS.rst https://github.com/psf/requests/blob/master/AUTHORS.rst Finally, requests 3 has a number of features.