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"

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.

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 .

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.

Seems fine. The fund is Indian and is set up for open-source software. The money is going to come from India. If you're not in India you have to file paperwork. This is pretty normal stuff. If you don't want to file paperwork you can choose not to take money from the fund. Everything here is fine except this guy applied and only then realized the requirements. That's a mistake (because they'll now have to reallocate to someone they had to decline) but a very minor one.

The whole thing just seems in the realm of "I was going to pay for a car but then it cost too much" i.e. it's just stuff that you'd like to have but then you didn't want to do what it cost so you opted out. Quite a mundane thing.

Seems unnecessary to post about all this personal data this and stuff like that but in open-source software what you get in freedom you pay for in drama.

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.

It's always a tough moment for the community when a project as polished as Pocketbase hits a funding wall. It highlights the 'single point of failure' risk in one-person maintainer projects, even when the tech is solid. I hope they find a sustainable path forward that doesn't require compromising on their 'no-build' or 'single file' philosophy.

Could floss.fund reach an agreement with foreign orgs with similar goals, and let them to the disbursement to individuals?

eg https://www.spi-inc.org/ https://nlnet.nl/

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.

not sure what the controversy here is receiving funding isn't the funder owning or hosting pocketbase ?

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

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.