Pocketbase lost its funding from FLOSS fund
github.com
github.com
The funding source was dropped by Github, and the terms Pocketbase accepted for funding include being paid through Github by FLOSS Fund. FLOSS Fund refused to follow the regulatory requirements to continue funding projects through Github, and Github dropped them as a funding source.
What the Pocketbase maintainer decided was to drop FLOSS Fund after they tried to renegotiate the contract in dangerous and unethical ways. FLOSS Fund chose to not follow regulatory requirements that Github required.
It may be reasonable for pocketbase to refuse, but i have trouble seeing floss fund being unethical or in the wrong when we're talking about giving away money for nothing. Especially when the ask is just fill out the paperwork for a wire transfer, the world standard for sending money internationally.
If I was in his place, I don't think I'd send everything required to steal my identity to some company in a foreign country that I have no legal recourse in.
So his ID is probably there already
This appears much more reasonable to me than the hoops I have to jump through to declare my taxes as an US expatriate and avoid double taxation with my country of residence.
If the IBAM is the concern you can create a separate IBAN with Wise / Revolut for example quite easily (and for free, and for sure cheaper than refusing the money).
The email they sent to Pocketbase (posted elsewhere in the thread) makes it sound like the regulatory issue with GitHub funding is still being worked on. The email also doesn't sound like it ruled out the option to wait until the GitHub situation potentially gets sorted out in the future and simply recommended that they use a wire transfer to get things moving.
Funds don't operate outside the legal framework, they are well within it and are expected to show their paperwork at the drop of a hat to any auditor that comes knocking. If they just wired sums that are at or near the reporting requirement to any callers they'd be in pretty hot water.
I've had an AML check for the grand sum of 900 euros once.
Hey ******, I hope you're doing well. I apologise for the long delay on this disbursal from our end, and for not reaching out to you sooner.
I am writing to you with an update on GitHub Sponsors, your preferred mode of payment. Unfortunately, we're currently unable to process payments through GitHub Sponsors, Liberapay, OpenCollective, or similar platforms due to regulatory constraints. We still have no clarity on when this will become possible. We shared some context on this earlier here: https://floss.fund/blog/second-tranche-2025-anniversary/
We recommend that we move ahead with a wire transfer (although it involves some paperwork!). This involves:
1) Tax Residency Certificate (TRC) from your country of residence/incorporation for the current year.
2) Signed copy of the "No Permanent Establishment in India Declaration" (Template attached)
3) Form 10F to avoid double taxation for non-Indian entities and individuals. This is an online form that has to be filled out on the Indian Tax Department website. Instructions on how to fill it out are attached to this email. Please refer to this FAQ for more details.
4) Service Agreement – Please fill in the sections marked in yellow and send it back to us (Attached)
5) Invoice for the grant amount (sample attached with required fields highlighted, feel free to use your own invoice template if needed. Please mention "project development support" in the invoice description).
Once you have these, please send them over so that we can begin processing the payment.
Please note that these documents are required in our jurisdiction (India) for processing foreign payments. A percentage of the payment will be withheld as per the DTAA (Double-Taxation Avoidance Agreement) between India and your country, which the recipient can claim back while filing tax returns in their country. The specific withholding rate depends on the DTAA regulations between your country and India.
If you have any questions, please feel free to write to us.
Thank you once again for your patience
It looks like the author here is from Bulgaria, so who knows what other hassles they would have on their side.
You can look at the us W8-BEN
These are needed to reduce withholding taxes and claim treaty benefits .
Also, I'd argue there are ways to make it reasonably secure over email. An encrypted attachment with a securely pre-shared key doesn't seem too risky IMO.
The OP (and others) have right to opinions but I see bunch of projects having successfully received their grants https://floss.fund/projects/2025. OpenSSL and Krita being the prominent ones that I recognize.
Calling the fund dangerous and unethical when they personally have zero control over regulations seems over the top to me.
Go on.
These are just the requirements to claim treaty benefits . A little bit of research wouldn't hurt.
You have to fill out the Form-10f to claim treaty benefits for the reduction of withholding tax on services and royalties .
These are the requirements:
Tax Residency Certificate (TRC) (= extract from cantonal commercial register) • Non-Permanent Establishment Declaration (No PE Declaration) • Form 10F: If you are registered accordingly, Form 10F can be submitted online.
Source: https://www.s-ge.com/en/article/export-knowhow/2023-e-india-...
This is very unprofessional in my opinion how pocket base handled that issue as this is a perfectly reasonable request .
It's a similar to the W8-BEN non us resident aliens have to file .
Sure, but they weren't the original requirements under which he accepted the funds. He accepted the funds assuming GitHub was going to be the mediator.
The new requirements require him to disclose significantly more information about himself. Maybe he isn't comfortable doing that? I wouldn't call it unprofessional.
This isn't a simple grammar mistake by someone who may not use English as their first language. There is a blame game going on here which is the only unethical thing going on in the situation.
> To apply, the project must place a funding.json in their public code repository or at a well-known uri location on their domain [...] That's already 10x more simpler than the 20 page document some of these other orgs have you fill. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41857032
But the author of the issue for Pocketbase writes:
> due to some unforeseen regulatory constraints their partnership with GitHub didn't seem to work out. Instead they want to issue a wire transfer from India requiring several cross-jurisdictional paperwork but I don't feel comfortable doing that
It's a shame that it didn't seem like they could work out how to keep it as simple, I wonder if basing it in a different country could have made a difference.
I get the sense that ganigeorgiev is feeling the thanklessness of open source work, and I so wish that he had an easier time of it.
That said, it's a shame that a FLOSS fund being based in India is reason enough for it to be avoided. Like, I understand that Indians might be overrepresented in the scam space right now, but avoiding funding because of it involving "sharing data with the Indian government" is very silly in my opinion. And insulting to India.
You can keep dreaming. I actually lived under the previous administration where there were power cuts every day for about 6-9 hours in summer.
Better keep your delusional politics to reddit.
Just to rub it in. Compared to the regime before 2014 where Prime Minister used to report to a foreign lady. I am pretty happy with the where the country is going.
If you want to critique the anti-Muslim sentiment, democratic backsliding, or using nationalism as a veneer for corruption-- then I would have taken you seriously. AS it is though, even if it may not be rosy, on paper India is doing quite well.
The whole thing just seems in the realm of "I was going to pay for a car but then it cost too much" i.e. it's just stuff that you'd like to have but then you didn't want to do what it cost so you opted out. Quite a mundane thing.
Seems unnecessary to post about all this personal data this and stuff like that but in open-source software what you get in freedom you pay for in drama.
I've also never had the impression that he really needed the money to continue maintaining Pocketbase.
He's entitled to his opinions, and if $30k is cheaper to him than his perceived breach of privacy and the hassle of paperwork, that's his prerogative.
Whatever Pcketbase is (or does), we should all understand that the difficulty here has nothing to do with the merits of the project nor any decision made by FLOSS about it.
I get the philosophical reasons behind why it doesn’t and why it’s SQLite only.
It’s just that in a corporate environment, I could trivially deliver full production ready applications because there is a team that handles all the Postgres replication/failover/ha/dr/backups/recovery for me. Pocketbase with pg would be super simple to deploy to a pod, getting 95% of production readiness done.
So... you want Supabase? which is what Pocketbase is inspired by.
Most enterprise teams have plug and play SQL databases ready to go, anything else would require more work with DevOps.
https://supabase.com/docs/guides/self-hosting/docker
i havent tried self hosting but it doesn't look too tricky
You can circumvent international wire transfers for cheaper and faster
The same banks give less scrutiny to domestic transfers so just convert your international wires into domestic ones - from the domestic exchange to your domestic bank account
We’ve done that specifically with our Indian vendors and vice versa for 10 years
there are options that are stable and regulated, so there is absolutely no reason to appeal to the authority of an antiquated and onerous regulation
Author is just being silly.
I don't think they ever saw that funding in the first place, if I'm reading "not waiting for the disbursal before making big announcements" correctly. I guess you need to be disappointed about them never receiving it in the first place, although it doesn't seem like the project owner would necessarily agree with you.