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Comment by edoceo | Hacker News Reader

You can (and should) give them money if you find value. Do it, feels good.

I'm not sure who you have been giving money to, but Gorhill notoriously does not accept donations as he does not want this project to have money be a goal what-so-ever and does not want to feel like he needs to work on ublock origin. That said he strongly encourages donating to the ublock origin lists as without them ubo would be nothing.

See here: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Why-don't-you-accept-...

I would absolutely love to, but does the author even accept donations? I just combed through my about page and the Github README and didn't see anything related. I was kinda hoping he had a Patreon. Am I blind, or is it just not there?

He writes in his FAQ [1]:

> I don't want the administrative workload coming with donations. I don't want the project to become in need of funding in any way: no dedicated home page + no forum = no cost = no need for funding. I want to be free to move onto something else if ever I get tired working on these projects (no donations = no expectations).

> Have a thought for the maintainers of the various lists. These lists are everything. This can't be emphasized enough.

[1] - https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Why-don't-you-accept-...

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).

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

Is that income uniquely difficult to explain?

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

"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.

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...

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Why-don't-you-accept-...

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