What are the more simple steps a package manager can take today to make this less painful? Asking for a friend as I work on one of these. I hear about the pain

What are the more simple steps a package manager can take today to make this less painful? Asking for a friend as I work on one of these. I hear about the pain here, but not so sure what layer the solution should be at. While I’ve been exposed to this problem a number of times and have pushed similar concepts like an easy way to see how to donate to a package, I don’t quite grasp the economics nor downstream effects this will have on the world. If everyone starts to charge money to use their packages, how do we further the development of open source projects and the innovation that brings? How can the student or budget developer be productive if they cannot use packages they rely on to get the job done? What about less developed countries and their access? If major dependencies are paywalled, how does that affect other packages/projects that took on the dependency? This might get messy quick and change developer behavior to write their own libs / reinvent the wheel. I do agree that there are better models than donations, but I think we should think in terms of accepting that open source is still open/free and supplementing around it rather than locking access down. Other platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and others have concepts of creator funds or viewership funds. Perhaps that model may apply better to package managers. Another idea is taking those models to the private consumer and providing access to subscriber only content/support that is in addition to what is published on the platform itself. I think this is one of the hardest problems to solve in the package management space. It’s a social problem rather than a technology one and that makes it immensely difficult to start with.