As bears are for building, I’ve been spitballing some ideas.
Wondered if there would be any interest in the following:
Sites like Flathub (https://flathub.org) make distributing free software on Linux easier than ever. However, one of the draw backs to these services is that everything must be free - taking on responsibility for global payments and currency handling tends to be far out of scope for site maintainers and opens up a ton of legal and financial compliance work.
The solution is simple: a lightning enabled Linux app market place.
Developers get paid direct to their own Lightning wallets, where they can manage any tax liabilities themselves. Prices can be pegged to local currencies and sat denominated, with developers free to instantly exchange however they see fit.
A number of payment models can be offered by developers however they see fit (donation, pay-what-you-like, pay for flatpaks but allow free compile from source etc.)
How does it sound?
Sounds interesting. One thing to check out is the model that Elementary OS uses. In its app store it has a default price for the software (e.g. $5, paid with credit card), but each user can manually lower that to 0 if they don't want to pay.
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That’s interesting. I think ‘nudging’ users to contribute but leaving the option for free downloads is the way to go, at least initially.
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I love it!
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