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Comment by preommr | Hacker News Reader

Dude could still do a monthly patreon and cancel it if he didn't want to work on it anymore

The maintainer of Ublock Origin does not want to make money from this. He does not want Ublock to turn into Adblock Plus.

If there is no money involved the project cannot be bribed by ad tech. The only acceptable ads are the ones the user white lists.

The point is to make money from the users, not from advertising companies, which is the opposite of adblock. He could still refuse ads by ad tech, I don't see how donations by users would force him.

Money corrupts. The tech sector is living proof at that.

That's exactly the point. You want to be financially independent, or at least earn enough to live to reduce the risk of being corrupted by ad tech money.

I wouldn't do that if I were him because I don't know how to explain that income to the IRS (or rather, the Finanzamt, since I'm German).

Is that income uniquely difficult to explain?

How would you explain that you're making money from a project summary of UBlock?

It might depend, on country, but I know that usually you can mention donations as "donations" in your income papers/form.

Don't know how it would be for an opensource project. Mentioning something like "open source browser extension uBlock Origin" probably...

Interesting how people report their donations, patreons, etc.

Patreon aren't donations, they are recurring income in exchange of something (membership model with specific rewards per tier). In many jurisductions these must be declared differently.

Patreon sends a 1099-K if you get more than $20K in a year.

https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/207099566-Will...

"Freelance software development", problem solved. Not that the tax authority cares at all where the money comes from. They don't have a "cash income" category because they have a deep and burning desire to know these things. They're primarily busy with taking their cut.

In general, the IRS rarely cares about how you're generating income more that you just remember to pay taxes on it appropriately.

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