Pocketbase lost its funding from FLOSS fund
github.com83 points by Onavo 5 hours ago
83 points by Onavo 5 hours ago
These are very reasonable requirements .
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 .
I sincerely apologize that you found free and open source project on Hacker News to be unprofessional. I would love to tell you to fuck off in a meeting, please book one at the URL on my corporate page.
I think this submission should be re-titled. From the post, it seems that the author voluntarily declined funding from FLOSS/Fund because they "don't trust them, nor the India government, with processing and storing personal sensitive data"
I think it shouldn't.
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.
Calling standard KYC paperwork for international wire transfers "dangerous and unethical" is a huge stretch. Every cross-border payment requires this stuff. The fund is literally trying to give away free money and the maintainer threw a fit because they had to fill out a tax form. I get being cautious about sharing personal info but framing compliance requirements as some kind of attack is drama for drama's sake.
Are you saying sending money via Wire transfer is unethical? Its a standard way to send money in cross boarder transactions. Please do note that India is highly regulated for financial transaction that go outside the country so, please don't spread something like they are doing it illegally. Zerodha is a well known firm they are open about this funding. 1 Million every year just because they used many oss project. That is not un ethical.
From what I can tell, no, they weren't just asking for wire details. They were were asking for multiple forms of identification.
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.
The irony is that a lot of the KYC checks are actually done in India: Jumio, Onfido, LexisNexis, Refinitiv, HyperVerge, IDfy, Signzy (a lot of major banks)
So his ID is probably there already
Its a contract where they give money in exchange for basically nothing.
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.
Don't think escrow is possible because of KYC requirements, then again the regulations in India might be different.
Unethical ? "they want to issue a wire transfer, but I don't feel comfortable giving my IBAN"
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).
Here's the actual e-mail the fund sent:
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
These are perfectly normal requests .
These are needed to reduce withholding taxes and claim treaty benefits .
Looking at the required paperwork, I agree with Pocketbase to refuse funding.
If you were already setup as a non-profit entity with 501c3 US taxes (or similar in other locales), this would be straightforward. Or, even if you were a for-profit company taking part with an LLC or other corporate structure. In those cases, you probably already have an accountant or tax advisor to help handle this stuff. For smaller individual level contributors, I can see how the extra paperwork and overhead could create enough of a hassle to make it not worthwhile. Which is sad.
It looks like the author here is from Bulgaria, so who knows what other hassles they would have on their side.
Why? I don't see it as particularly onerous. They are simply complying with their country's KYC requirements. I've gone through worse to accept payments from US citizens with a US corporation. KYC/AML is annoying but its pretty unavoidable unless you want to do crypto.
It's not really kyc . It's just standard procedure to claim Double tax treaty benefits.
You can look at the us W8-BEN
invoice for fund disbursement? are they trying to donate as expenses?
Most US companies take a tax deduction for charitable donations, I don't see why that wouldn't be the same for an Indian firm.
Paying individual OSS contributors is not a charitable donation with regard to taxes. It's not a deductible business expense and typically leads to double taxation.
No it's just that the Indian company is required to withhold taxes . But they want to use the double taxation treaty to claim benefits to reduce it
It's a wire transfer not your medical records. Use escrow if you are paranoid.
The conversation in comments seem to devolving in weird ways.
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.
Back in 2024, FLOSS/fund was described like this on HN:
> 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.
India have a strict process for sending and receiving money from outside as investment. Its mainly to avoid black money i guess.
Given the impact of international terrorism and crime on India, minimising illicit money flow in and out of the country seems an inherently sensible precaution.
Indians are to blame for this. The indian goverment is dictatorial and has no expectations or respect of privacy or human rights
I don’t think it’s fair to conflate the people of India with their government
As a population they're responsible for picking their government.
In the same way an adult is responsable for "picking" the religion that it was imposed upon them by their parents during their childhood.
Such a shame. I so love Pocketbase, used it when I was trying out HTMX for a side project.
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.
The Indian Govt is dictatorial and segregational. It is a valid concern. Freedom of speech and privacy are not something the government cares about upholding.
The Indian Govt is neither dictatorial not segregational. Maybe authoritarian which every Indian govt. after Independence.
Can you spell ICE, Flock and Ring?
Regardless of how authoritarian the government is in the project maintainer’s home country, exposing themselves to a second authoritarian jurisdiction is probably a bad idea.
Could floss.fund reach an agreement with foreign orgs with similar goals, and let them to the disbursement to individuals?
That's a shame, would love to know if "FLOSS fun" is legit or not. Seems like a mess.
Is India really that backwards of a country that the author doesn't want to accept money from there?
USDC has been an option for nearly 10 years
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
There are so many projects I could use pocketbase for, if only it supported Postgres.
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.
> There are so many projects I could use pocketbase for, if only it supported Postgres.
So... you want Supabase? which is what Pocketbase is inspired by.
It's not single binary, you need to spin up a dozen or so containers and have a full DevOps team on standby if self hosting.
Well yeah, that's the nature of using something like Supabase it is designed to scale and be flexible to develop on top of.
Yes, OP wants to hand the database to their team.
No. OP said they want to handle the database to their team. They didn't say anything about the auth, analytics, admin dashboards, real time change data management proxies, connection poolers to their team. Your modern backend as a service that's not pocketbase usually has a dozen moving parts.
Most enterprise teams have plug and play SQL databases ready to go, anything else would require more work with DevOps.
I am also building similar product but with different approach And just using SQLite for now but plan on adding Postgres support ( orm I am using supports it ) … but nowhere near production ready. Due to buzz around products like litestream I feel like just SQLite is also viable nowadays. I also have own cdc based replication thing wip but yeah just having fun stage
like others have said, try sup abase
https://supabase.com/docs/guides/self-hosting/docker
i havent tried self hosting but it doesn't look too tricky
setup is easy but you're stuck with one instance. they stripped all multi-tenant features and even the selfhosted version is missing essential features, scaling is off the table though.
not sure what the controversy here is receiving funding isn't the funder owning or hosting pocketbase ?
Pocketbase is such a smooth and easy-to-use database - great for people starting with web dev. I'm disappointed that it's not going to get the continued funding that it deserves.
> it's not going to get the continued funding that it deserves
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.