If other people also promote it, then I guess it could work. I don’t want to feel like I’m just personally pushing it on everyone.
This is the new law (which apparently is coming into effect in march 2020): Rahankeräyslaki 863/2019 - Säädökset alkuperäisinä - FINLEX ®
There doesn’t seem to be an English translation. But the most important part, I think, is this:
From the definitions what is collecting donations: “rahankeräyksellä toimintaa, jossa yleisöön vetoamalla kerätään vastikkeetta rahaa;”
Roughly translates to “collecting money is defined as activity where the public is appealed to give money without compensation” Here’s some possible other translations for “vastike”: vastike englanniksi - Sanakirja.org (suomi-englanti)
So basically the law for collecting money without compensation does not apply if some compensation is provided (however it seems that a small token as appreciation for donating money might not count as compensation).
Basically I think that subscription services count as products so providing things like: access to patron only updates, dev builds and maybe guaranteed Q&A question answers, would be legal.
I think it’s complicated. Any significant system is difficult to work with. I don’t think there is ever any way to make it fully easy for new people to get aboard an existing software project. For example at work, it’s taken me many, many months to become somewhat familiar with our product and its architecture, and that was while working full time on the product, I still have to discuss things with our lead developer when doing something architecturally significant. I think this applies to thrive as well, it’s very difficult for even a good programmer to grasp what is going on. I would imagine that as this is starting to look like a very widespread problem to me, that there would be some research or advice online how to tackle this. I have two (or three) ideas to tackle this: make a section (perhaps on the community forums) for asking any thrive development or code related questions, which I would then answer (or someone else from the team if they know about what is being asked), this could maybe even be made into a video series as some things might be just easier to show on video than answer in text form. The other idea is that we’ll write a guide for developing thrive with the different parts explained, where to find things, and also answer any problem areas that the current developers have ran into.
As no one objected I think we should contact the conservancy. I’ll post a draft email on the discord soon to not mess it up.