fosspay

Helps you get paid for your open source work.

Rationale

I write a ton of open source software, but almost none of it is on the scale that I can expect reliable income from donations, or the sorts of projects that a business would be likely to fund. It's very unlikely that I'd receive enough donations from random folks to support full time open source work, but full time is the best way to make serious progress on your projects.

So - here's how this works: supporters give you one-time or recurring donations, and after a while you get enough to take a week off from work to spend on open source work. Since I have several projects, I also ask supporters to tell me what project they're donating towards, and I distribute the load based on which projects receive the most support.

Before you start

Talk to your employer. The way that this is designed to work is that you continue working full-time at your job, and collect donations. After a while, you should have enough donations to take some period of unpaid leave - a week, a month, or whatever works.

• You keep your current job and job security
• You get paid to work on FOSS even with flaky or inconsistent donations
• Everyone wins

There are a few things you need to talk about with your employer:

1. Make sure you own the IP for the things you write during your open source sprints.
2. Make sure that you have a job to come back to afterwards.
3. Research the tax implications of accepting these donations.

Stripe

Payments are taken through Stripe, which is pretty headache-free for you to use. You need to set up an approved Stripe account, which you can get from here:

https://stripe.com/

Mandrill

You will need a mail server of some sort. If you don't want to go through the trouble of setting one up, you can use Mandrill:

http://mandrill.com/

You can probably also use your existing mail server, which is what I do, which makes it easy for people to email you questions and such.

SSL

You will need an SSL certificate for your website (you also need a domain name). You can get a free SSL certificate from StartSSL, but they've always felt pretty... bad to me. You can pay for one instead at RapidSSL, which is what I use personally. You can also get one for free from Let's Encrypt if that ever happens.

If you need a domain, you can use my referral link for Namecheap and that'd be super nice of you. Here's a link to Namecheap without the referral link: Namecheap.

Installation

Install these things (Arch Linux packages in parenthesis):

• Python 3 (python)
• PostgreSQL (postgresql)
• scss (ruby-sass)
• Flask (python-flask)
• SQLAlchemy (python-sqlalchemy)
• Flask-Login (python-flask-login)
• psycopg2 (python-psycopg2)
• bcrypt (python-bcrypt)

You'll have to configure PostgreSQL yourself and get a connection string that fosspay can use. Then you can clone this repository to wherever you want to run it from (I suggest making an unprivledged user account on the server you want to host this on).

Configuration

Copy config.ini.example to config.ini and edit it to your liking. Then, you can run this command to try the site in development mode:

python app.py

Click here to visit your donation site and further instructions will be provided there.

Production Deployment

To deploy this to production, copy the systemd unit from contrib/ to your server at /etc/systemd/system/ (or whatever's appropriate for your distro). Use sytsemctl enable fosspay and systemctl start fosspay to run the site on 127.0.0.1:8000 (you can change this port by editing the unit file). You should configure nginx to proxy through to fosspay from whatever other website you already have. My nginx config is provided in contrib/ for you to take a look at - it proxies most requests to Github pages (my blog), and /donate to fosspay.