Patrick Volkerding troubles; Slackware Store has been problematic

A Web forum post
(https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/donating-to-slackware-4175634729/#post5882751, quoted below)
is credibly believed[1] to be from Slackware founder / director / BDFL
Patrick Volkerding.  Further follow-up discussion appears to be
happening on HackerNews at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17598685  .

People are suggesting the Usual Suspects (Patreon, PayPal, GoFundMe,
Bitcoin, etc.) for alternatively ways of supporting Patrick, but various issues
exist with those.  (A Bitcoin address has been widely posted, but to my
knowledge there's no confirmation that this actually reaches Patrick
rather than someone else entirely.)  Longtime Debian developer Joey Hess
became so disenchanted with Patreon that he moved to competitor
Liberapay[2], which he now recommends.  (See Joey's comments about Patreon
problems at https://www.patreon.com/joeyh .)

Some also (rather raucous) discussing is occurring on the ever-fractious 
/r/linux/ subReddit, at
https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/91csco/the_guy_that_makesoversees_slackware_needs_some/  .



   07-23-2018, 03:14 PM
   volkerdi
   Slackware Maintainer
   Registered: Dec 2002
   Location: Minnesota
   Distribution: Slackware! :-)
   Posts: 1,530

   I told them to take it down [RM: the link on store.slackware.com
   for donating money] or I'd suspend the DNS for the store.

   I've been mulling over exactly how to tell you all this, and I guess
   this is as good a place as any. The store has been ripping me off
   horribly, and I'm very nearly broke. I have no evidence that they've
   ever done anything with donations besides line their own pockets. I've
   not been paid any money by them in two years. That was upon the 14.2
   release (and followed another long period of time with no income). The
   14.2 release generated nearly $100K in revenue. The store gave me $15K,
   and later said that I was "overpaid".

   When I agreed to set up the store, it was structured as a company
   where they owned 60%, and my wife and I owned 40%. I had not yet escaped
   California and would have quickly gone broke there with a house
   underwater had I not taken the deal. And 60% seemed fair, since the idea
   was that the company would be providing health insurance, paying for the
   production of the goods, and handling shipping and related customer
   service. And when my daughter was born and needed surgery and continuing
   medical attention I could hardly jeopardize our insurance in the days
   before the ACA. I was between a rock and a hard place like many
   residents of the US. Since then, the store has ceased to provide any
   benefits, and shouldn't even be getting a 50/50 split in my opinion,
   much less looting the coffers for 81+% (anything they want to spend
   money on is an expense, apparently, while any expenses I have to support
   the actual project come out of the peanuts they toss me). I only found
   out about how bad it really was last year when I finally managed to get
   some numbers out of them. I thought the sales were just that bad, and
   was really rather depressed about it. Another side note - the ownership
   of the 60% portion of the store changed hands behind my back. Nobody
   thought they needed to tell me about this. At that point I'd say things
   got considerably worse for me.

   Still not sure how to move forward, but I have some hope that the
   community might think that my work is and has been worth supporting. If
   at all possible I'd like to get away from replicating physical media
   which seems to be a lost cause. T-shirts? Well, maybe, but I don't see
   that providing a reasonable income either. I'm wondering how Patreon
   would do. It would at least be better than nothing, which is where I am
   now.

   Through all of this I have continued to work hard towards getting
   Slackware 15.0 released because I believe it will be by far the best
   release we've ever had, and because I'm dedicated to my work and the
   community that uses it. I've never really been in this for the money. At
   any given juncture (including now) I've had numerous opportunities that
   would support me and my family far better and would provide us with the
   things that we need rather desperately. I mean, I'm sitting here in a
   house with a giant hole in the roof, a broken door sealed with duct
   tape, and a failed air conditioning condenser that I can't afford to
   fix, my wife has been driving on a spare tire for weeks, my teeth need
   serious attention again, and I only just got a machine here with UEFI
   for the first time (bought a used machine... really out of my budget but
   it had to be done).

   I'm open to suggestions at this point. As far as Slackware 15.0 goes,
   I've been testing PAM and Kerberos here and have given quite some
   thought to trying to get them merged (or at least in /testing) so that
   we can have proper support for Active Directory and NFS. Plasma 5 has
   be en a consideration as well, although frankly it's grown much larger
   than GNOME was back when I decided that should be spun off for third
   party maintenance. If that's going in, we really need to analyze which
   dependencies would not be used outside of Plasma and stick all of those
   in the KDE series. I'm as tired of the pollution of the L series as the
   rest of you are.

     "I did this 'cause Linux gives me a woody. It doesn't generate revenue."
     -- Dave '-ddt->` Taylor, announcing DOOM for Linux


[1] Two days have passed from that posting without Patrick rising to say
'Hey, that wasn't me.'  Also, it's a posting account with 16 years of
history.

[2] The politics surrounding online payment systems are somewhat twisty.
FWIW:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberapay