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

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.