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> Where it does break down is with excessive fragmentation. A hundred small libraries each doing one thing will get much less corporate support than a single im

by _bxg1 7y ago

> Where it does break down is with excessive fragmentation. A hundred small libraries each doing one thing will get much less corporate support than a single important library that does the same hundred things. I think you've nailed it; similar patterns have played out with news/blog sites, or even media like music and indie games. The internet has allowed for rich selections of micro-products to pop up, get created, get distributed. But we have yet to solve the problem of getting the money flowing the other way through the same ever-more-fine-grained tree. It's not that people refuse to pay for their news, it's that they don't want to sign up for and pay for dozens of different sources which they might follow a link to once a month. It's not (primarily) that people refuse to pay for software, it's that people don't want to spend the energy tracking down how to donate a couple dollars to the 100 different NPM dependencies their project has. In all these cases, unless you're a household name, you're going to get lost in the noise. Ads have traditionally been the workaround for this. They don't require any involvement from users, and they scale based on traffic. I supported Feross' experiment because I see (non-tracking) ads as a necessary evil until we come up with a better solution to this problem. Proposed solutions include bundles, Patreon, GitHub Sponsors, and what Brave is doing for web content. None of these have changed the equation yet, though, and it's a really vital problem to solve in today's world of content creation.

agustif 7y ago
What aboout a Spotify-like rev-share model, where the user only Subscribes once, Paying Whatever you want monthly, and then the platform redistributes that to your repo's deps on some way, make it easy to give extra tip's after nice interactions/issues-solved/pr's-merged/releases etc
- kemitchell 7y ago
  The closest to that model is Tidelift, though last I checked, they still sell only add-on assurances, not permission to use the software to begin with.
  - agustif 7y ago
    Yeah I'm aware of Tidelift but it's still very not much a real thing for me. Good for enterprises I guess. It's just something I randomly but cyclically think about, here some old notes about it: What if GitHub Stars = Money Problem? I might want to give back to open source, but I’m too ignorant or lazy to actually do it. Create an indie platform that lets you create a one time or subscription donation to all your GitHub innteractions based on Stars, issues open, etc… If I have 1000 Stars and donate 100 dollars, each repo would get 10 cents, if 10 more people have starred the same repo than I have, the repo owner would get 1 dollar. So if she or he has 1000 stars, that’d mean she or he gets 100$ Stars are not so meaningless anymore. After first donation to a new repo, open an issue encouraging to get to minimum payout amount faster by pushing a badge into readme as a PR. PS: Original personal note from 23 may 2019, If I recall properly this was pre GhSponsors
    - kemitchell 7y ago
      There have been several attempts to create "tip jars" for open source that automatically split a total commitment across multiple projects or developers. Several ran aground on implementation issues like money transmitter regulation and payment processing. But even when the systems worked well and stayed out of trouble, they just didn't see that much money flowing through. Two subspecies of the tip jar rose to public prominence in the last few years. Crowdfunding sites like Patreon focus on perks. Both legally and practically, they eschew "donation", partly to avoid money transmission issues, partly because people are just more likely to give money for something in return, rather than gratuitously. Open software coders who've done well via these platforms number very few and often offer substantial perks that appeal to "enterprise" customers at high tiers. Sites like OpenCollective focus on raising for groups, rather than individuals. The amounts committed to groups can sometimes reach significant looking totals in the thousands of dollars, but splitting among contributors often cuts the per-individual number down significantly. The transparency and other groupware features put social pressure on individual developers not to take too much.
- _bxg1 7y ago
  Yep. Perhaps repositories like NPM run such a system, giving you perks for subscribing or maybe just framing it as a (cheap) donation, and then each time you NPM install a package they factor that in to how your fee will get distributed. Even if it were a $5 monthly donation they asked for out of the goodness of people's hearts, which automatically and granularly divvied itself up based on what you use, I bet it would go a long way.
  - agustif 7y ago
    I would have a problem trusting npm or GitHub (Microsoft) with my donation money because of the same issues I've with mainstream NGO who play ads on TV of famelic enfants to make you send a paid/premium SMS... of which the ISP gets more than a 30% of the cut to start, and probably most of it will end up spent in whatever the C-level people in such organization consier fun. npm is very much a business, stuff like pnpm, an yarn exist for a reason!
    - _bxg1 7y ago
      That's silly. NPM's business relies on its thriving package ecosystem, and ecosystems like it face a very real risk from this problem. It would be in their interest to provide such a service, and it would swiftly become obvious if any funny-business were going on, at which point their reputation would be completely decimated.
HomeDeLaPot 7y ago
The news thing is interesting. What if there was a platform/network that let you sign up in one place and get access to many different sources? Instead of subscribing to the NYT and the WSJ and National Geographic and The Guardian, you buy a tiered subscription on this platform and get a certain number of ad-free article views per month at any of the sites you want. When you pass the limit, you don't get shut out -- you just get ads and a reminder to increase your limit.

by _bxg1 7y ago

agustif 7y ago

What aboout a Spotify-like rev-share model, where the user only Subscribes once, Paying Whatever you want monthly, and then the platform redistributes that to your repo's deps on some way, make it easy to give extra tip's after nice interactions/issues-solved/pr's-merged/releases etc

kemitchell 7y ago
The closest to that model is Tidelift, though last I checked, they still sell only add-on assurances, not permission to use the software to begin with.
- agustif 7y ago
  Yeah I'm aware of Tidelift but it's still very not much a real thing for me. Good for enterprises I guess. It's just something I randomly but cyclically think about, here some old notes about it: What if GitHub Stars = Money Problem? I might want to give back to open source, but I’m too ignorant or lazy to actually do it. Create an indie platform that lets you create a one time or subscription donation to all your GitHub innteractions based on Stars, issues open, etc… If I have 1000 Stars and donate 100 dollars, each repo would get 10 cents, if 10 more people have starred the same repo than I have, the repo owner would get 1 dollar. So if she or he has 1000 stars, that’d mean she or he gets 100$ Stars are not so meaningless anymore. After first donation to a new repo, open an issue encouraging to get to minimum payout amount faster by pushing a badge into readme as a PR. PS: Original personal note from 23 may 2019, If I recall properly this was pre GhSponsors
  - kemitchell 7y ago
    There have been several attempts to create "tip jars" for open source that automatically split a total commitment across multiple projects or developers. Several ran aground on implementation issues like money transmitter regulation and payment processing. But even when the systems worked well and stayed out of trouble, they just didn't see that much money flowing through. Two subspecies of the tip jar rose to public prominence in the last few years. Crowdfunding sites like Patreon focus on perks. Both legally and practically, they eschew "donation", partly to avoid money transmission issues, partly because people are just more likely to give money for something in return, rather than gratuitously. Open software coders who've done well via these platforms number very few and often offer substantial perks that appeal to "enterprise" customers at high tiers. Sites like OpenCollective focus on raising for groups, rather than individuals. The amounts committed to groups can sometimes reach significant looking totals in the thousands of dollars, but splitting among contributors often cuts the per-individual number down significantly. The transparency and other groupware features put social pressure on individual developers not to take too much.
_bxg1 7y ago
Yep. Perhaps repositories like NPM run such a system, giving you perks for subscribing or maybe just framing it as a (cheap) donation, and then each time you NPM install a package they factor that in to how your fee will get distributed. Even if it were a $5 monthly donation they asked for out of the goodness of people's hearts, which automatically and granularly divvied itself up based on what you use, I bet it would go a long way.
- agustif 7y ago
  I would have a problem trusting npm or GitHub (Microsoft) with my donation money because of the same issues I've with mainstream NGO who play ads on TV of famelic enfants to make you send a paid/premium SMS... of which the ISP gets more than a 30% of the cut to start, and probably most of it will end up spent in whatever the C-level people in such organization consier fun. npm is very much a business, stuff like pnpm, an yarn exist for a reason!
  - _bxg1 7y ago
    That's silly. NPM's business relies on its thriving package ecosystem, and ecosystems like it face a very real risk from this problem. It would be in their interest to provide such a service, and it would swiftly become obvious if any funny-business were going on, at which point their reputation would be completely decimated.

HomeDeLaPot 7y ago

The news thing is interesting. What if there was a platform/network that let you sign up in one place and get access to many different sources? Instead of subscribing to the NYT and the WSJ and National Geographic and The Guardian, you buy a tiered subscription on this platform and get a certain number of ad-free article views per month at any of the sites you want. When you pass the limit, you don't get shut out -- you just get ads and a reminder to increase your limit.