4 ms·

Idea for anyone who wants to make it: Make a website where any person or company can donate a fixed amount (one-time, periodically) that gets donated to open s

by seibelj 10y ago

Idea for anyone who wants to make it: Make a website where any person or company can donate a fixed amount (one-time, periodically) that gets donated to open source. The website integrates with or links to as many open source projects as possible. Perhaps the website donates to each project once a month, pooling all the money together, to keep from having lots of transaction fees. To be more advanced, write a tool that scans all code bases and automatically tells you what open source products you use. So if I work for a company, I run the tool against all of our repositories, it determines which products we use, and it syncs with the website. Then, say we donate $100 a month, it gets split between all of them automatically in some sort of proportion. Then github open source projects can sign up with the website and become automatically tracked with the tool, so if someone or a company uses them they can get paid. I simply do not have the time to pursue this, but if I had the time I would. I believe it will vastly improve the open source community and help finance it.

llukas 10y ago
flattr.com
SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
Do you have any reason to believe companies would donate? My experience is we know what code we use, management just doesn't care to pay. (Not to knock the idea, I like it, just curious.)
PascLeRasc 10y ago
There were a bunch of sites like this discussed in the big Octave funding thread a few weeks/month back
cperciva 10y ago
To be more advanced, write a tool that scans all code bases and automatically tells you what open source products you use. So if I work for a company, I run the tool against all of our repositories, it determines which products we use, and it syncs with the website. Then, say we donate $100 a month, it gets split between all of them automatically in some sort of proportion. Deciding how to split the money is the hard part here. How do you decide what each product is "worth"? Is left-pad worth as much as Apache? Probably not -- so do you say that money gets divided in proportion to lines of code? But then you reward people for writing crappy code; why write a 1000-line program if you can write a 10,000-line program and get more money? And how do you account for different levels of usage? If I have a three-line Ruby script in my repository because I didn't want to spend five minutes to rewrite it as a shell script, and I run it once a month, do you count me as "using" Ruby? Now, a tool which enumerates all the open source code you're using could be useful. And maybe you could encourage users to make donations, and to tell you the relative value they get out of each tool. And maybe you could then suggest values based on how much other users say a particular tool is worth to them. But you're not going to get any sensible values from an automatic process; you'll need human valuation at some point in the process.
DanBC 10y ago
People sometimes say that it's impossible for their company to make open source donations, but that it is possible for a product to be bought. It doesn't really matter what that product is - a printed manual, or a bit of support, but it's the order placement and invoice cycle that's most important for the people writing the cheques. Without those bits of paperwork the company cannot pay.
daurnimator 10y ago
I sort of thought this was what gittip (now gratipay) was. But they ran into regulatory issues?

by seibelj 10y ago

llukas 10y ago

flattr.com

SomeStupidPoint 10y ago

Do you have any reason to believe companies would donate? My experience is we know what code we use, management just doesn't care to pay. (Not to knock the idea, I like it, just curious.)

PascLeRasc 10y ago

There were a bunch of sites like this discussed in the big Octave funding thread a few weeks/month back

cperciva 10y ago

To be more advanced, write a tool that scans all code bases and automatically tells you what open source products you use. So if I work for a company, I run the tool against all of our repositories, it determines which products we use, and it syncs with the website. Then, say we donate $100 a month, it gets split between all of them automatically in some sort of proportion. Deciding how to split the money is the hard part here. How do you decide what each product is "worth"? Is left-pad worth as much as Apache? Probably not -- so do you say that money gets divided in proportion to lines of code? But then you reward people for writing crappy code; why write a 1000-line program if you can write a 10,000-line program and get more money? And how do you account for different levels of usage? If I have a three-line Ruby script in my repository because I didn't want to spend five minutes to rewrite it as a shell script, and I run it once a month, do you count me as "using" Ruby? Now, a tool which enumerates all the open source code you're using could be useful. And maybe you could encourage users to make donations, and to tell you the relative value they get out of each tool. And maybe you could then suggest values based on how much other users say a particular tool is worth to them. But you're not going to get any sensible values from an automatic process; you'll need human valuation at some point in the process.

DanBC 10y ago

People sometimes say that it's impossible for their company to make open source donations, but that it is possible for a product to be bought. It doesn't really matter what that product is - a printed manual, or a bit of support, but it's the order placement and invoice cycle that's most important for the people writing the cheques. Without those bits of paperwork the company cannot pay.

daurnimator 10y ago

I sort of thought this was what gittip (now gratipay) was. But they ran into regulatory issues?