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 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 .

> 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.

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

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.

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