Re: PaySwarm-based Debian donations
Venture Communism <venturecommunism@yahoo.com>
> Everything you said made sense until you said PaySwarm might not bet
> the best way to expose financial data to the light of day. Actually
> PaySwarm's data formats are in JSON-LD and therefore allow for web
> native royalty-free ontology hosting in a way that is maximally
> interoperable with the web of open data.
JSON-LD seems fine. That doesn't mean I agree with embedding PaySwarm
into apt, or anything that's limited to the Meritoria payment
processor that is limited to US bank account holders, only uses USD,
charges $50/hour if you fail to meet US law (which as an Englishman, I
do not know much), makes you liable for unspecified "financial
network" fees and uses terms like "intellectual property theft" and
"sell digital content". Meritoria seems pretty much the opposite of
an international Free and Open Source Software project.
Now some of those problems are not their fault (US law, I suspect),
but still mean I would prefer not to recommend them. There are
reasons why Paypal is based in Singapore, besides the evil
scrutiny-avoiding ones.
Would it be possible to have a JSON-LD general donation tool that
could trigger other (maybe direct) transfers? Why has the W3C Web
Payments Group not published any specifications yet? The more I look
into the specific proposal, the less comfortable I am with it.
> Remember how I gave eight digit accuracy for two 1 cent transactions
> earlier in the thread, whereas SPI with all its manpower only has
> semi-structured table data where $100+K are taken in but only $13K
> are spent this year?
"SPI with all its manpower"??? SPI http://www.spi-inc.org/ could well
do with more manpower. I think it's currently running on less than a
dozen volunteers and some pro-bono advisors. Asking at
http://lists.spi-inc.org/listinfo/spi-general/
how one can help would be useful - I think I'll suggest adding "donations
of work" to its donations page, too!
If accounting for $0.02 of movements takes one person, then accounting
for $113+K might take 5650+... but I know it would be easier than that ;)
> Oh that's right, nobody knows or cares about the Debian budget sequester.
No, I think that's wrong. It's just not high enough up the todo lists
for the right people yet.
> Please see the following for more information on why linked data is the right way to expose financial data to the light of day: http://thepowerofpull.com/pull/foundations/semantic-web-acid-test
That's a cool link. I've minor qualms with it (like nonprofit is not
enough - qualifying as a nonprofit may be just accounting trickery
like a CEO's performance-related pay perfectly consuming all profits
and it doesn't mean the users control the standard) but it's
essentially right.
> If you ever want to get out of software cooperatives and into
> hardware cooperatives, http://venturecommunism.com is trying to open
> source the business models.
I'm unlikely to do so (I'm a statistician not an electronics guy), but
I'll make a note so that we can point any of the infrequent membership
enquiries from hardware hackers towards it!
Regards,
--
MJ Ray (slef), member of www.software.coop, a for-more-than-profit co-op.
http://koha-community.org supporter, web and library systems developer.
In My Opinion Only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
Available for hire (including development) at http://www.software.coop/
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