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I maintain a lot of open source projects, but IMO this is not the right approach. I think the [anecdote from @jbk](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29524103

I maintain a lot of open source projects, but IMO this is not the right approach. I think the [anecdote from @jbk](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29524103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29524103) about ffmpeg illustrates that. I also don't think the problem it solves gives the greatest benefit for the amount of work required. I think making it easier for companies to pay open source contributors is the right approach. For any company that builds software, finding and paying the open source projects they use is a massive amount of work and there's nothing that helps with that. If there was much less friction to paying maintainers, more companies would do it. I would love to see a tool that, given a pool of money, will collect dependencies from projects in any language (extensible), find the authors (git commit history, etc.), find where they accept contributions (extensible), and pay them, based on both computed and hand crafted weights.

fri_sch 5y ago
> I think making it easier for companies to pay open source contributors is the right approach. Making it easier and making it a common habit. Companies need to realize, that paying maintainers/contributors pays off for them. > I would love to see a tool that, given a pool of money, will collect dependencies from projects in any language (extensible), find the authors (git commit history, etc.), find where they accept contributions (extensible), and pay them, based on both computed and hand crafted weights. Looking at https://flossbank.com/ https://flossbank.com/, this seems like just what you describe. I don't know how it works exactly, though.
- alecthomas 5y ago
  > Making it easier and making it a common habit. Companies need to realize, that paying maintainers/contributors pays off for them. Definitely agreed. > Looking at https://flossbank.com/ https://flossbank.com/, this seems like just what you describe. I don't know how it works exactly, though. That looks ... related, but I _detest_ that it relies on injecting ads into package managers. It's also not extensible. I think an open source tool would be preferable so that incentives don't get skewed by for-profit motives. I would also prefer if the payments didn't go through a single company. Paying developers through GitHub Sponsors, Patreon, Flattr, or whatever their preferred mechanism is.

fri_sch 5y ago

> I think making it easier for companies to pay open source contributors is the right approach. Making it easier and making it a common habit. Companies need to realize, that paying maintainers/contributors pays off for them. > I would love to see a tool that, given a pool of money, will collect dependencies from projects in any language (extensible), find the authors (git commit history, etc.), find where they accept contributions (extensible), and pay them, based on both computed and hand crafted weights. Looking at https://flossbank.com/ https://flossbank.com/, this seems like just what you describe. I don't know how it works exactly, though.

alecthomas 5y ago
> Making it easier and making it a common habit. Companies need to realize, that paying maintainers/contributors pays off for them. Definitely agreed. > Looking at https://flossbank.com/ https://flossbank.com/, this seems like just what you describe. I don't know how it works exactly, though. That looks ... related, but I _detest_ that it relies on injecting ads into package managers. It's also not extensible. I think an open source tool would be preferable so that incentives don't get skewed by for-profit motives. I would also prefer if the payments didn't go through a single company. Paying developers through GitHub Sponsors, Patreon, Flattr, or whatever their preferred mechanism is.