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Comment by alannallama | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the times when the value of fiscal sponsorship really shines. For example, if you sign up with Open Source Collective [1] (which I'm on the team of), we can form a contract with the payer and receive the funds, then distribute them to you as the maintainer.

We do this kind of thing all the time for projects under our umbrella. We have lawyers on tap and lots of experience in this area, and we take on all the responsibility for tax reporting, legals, compliance, banking, invoicing etc etc.

If your project has >100 stars you can set up a Collective instantly.

[1] https://oscollective.org

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I took a look at your legalese https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/e/2PACX-1vQbiyK2Fe0jL...

And it looks like OSC only disburses money when it's a "valid expense" according to OSC and a 501c nonprofit. All extra money seems to be held in an account that OSC keeps the interest for, and funnels elsewhere upon termination of the agreement. So it seems that entering into an agreement with OSC involves losing control over who I can contract with, losing control over the donations and not having access to the money anymore except in very specific circumstances, and likely losing all of it should I decide to leave. On top of that, should I feel myself wronged by OSC, I essentially take on HUGE financial risk for legal action because you have a clause that the loser pays all fees of the winner (which basically means that the small guy loses always, because you can just drown him in paper until he gives up, broke, and then owes you hundreds of thousands on top of that to pay for your lawyers doing that to him - and you have a perverse incentive to do that because it will net you profit since your lawyers are in-house).

All of this is on top of the 10% fee you charge.

Interesting. I do like the idea of putting this out in the open for a bunch of different reasons.

You say that you can form a contract with the payer. I can't find anything mentioning that on your docs. Do you have the ability to make a contract which provides specific payments for different milestones?

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