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.
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
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 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).
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
> 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.
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
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.