14 ms·

GitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month to fund open source

• mfru 9mo ago
  Congratulations, HN reinvented the concept of taxes!
• vlad-roundabout 9mo ago
  A problem is that some Python library with a sole developer who is on the verge of halting maintenance needs your $1 way more than the Linux Foundation.
• rglullis 9mo ago
  Great. That would mean that 98% of the github users would leave it.
  • falloutx 9mo ago
    He said only for org users. Orgs are already paying github, 4-20$ per month per user.
    • no-name-here 9mo ago
      Although the article's author might have intentionally chosen a highly misleading title (ragebait?), as it would have been far less misleading (and shorter) to write "GitHub should charge orgs $1 more per month" instead of "everyone" ...
  • Aurornis 9mo ago
    The post is about users who have paid plans
• aaronblohowiak 9mo ago
  should be the transitive dependencies, not just top-level (so the lock file or equiv) or you just reward the "barely wrap it and give it a new name" js crowd even more.
• porise 9mo ago
  I paid 1 buck for WhatsApp back in the day. Better business model than what meta did with it. But we're moving closer and closer to 8 companies controlling the world. Both WhatsApp and github are owned by them.
  • ksec 9mo ago
    > we're moving closer and closer to 8 companies controlling the world. Which 8? In the control the world domain I see Meta, Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft. In terms of Market Cap you would add Tesla, Nvidia and TSMC, but these three aren't any where close to "controlling" the world category.
    • porise 9mo ago
      I would put Disney in there. I picked 8 arbitrarily but those companies have substantial pull in governmental regulations and the state of the web. Probably missing some Chinese companies. imo corporations have more pull on governments than governments have on businesses at this point as far as long term culture goes.
      • ksec 9mo ago
        Had you said these 8 companies controlling the world 5 to 6 years ago I would have partly agreed. But right now I see so many cracks in their game I am optimistic they wont control world and there will be new competition to challenge them.
        • helterskelter 9mo ago
          The trick will be getting around the regulations that are being set up to protect interests of government and big business at the expense of everybody else. This will only become more difficult as time goes on.
• jmclnx 9mo ago
  I disagree, due to github copilot and other AI crap Microsoft is adding to GitHub, they should pay us 5 USD per month.
  • csomar 9mo ago
    Did you read the article? Though I can agree the title is bait.
    • jmclnx 9mo ago
      Yes I read it, but still, charging me $1 so M/S can spy on what I do and make money off of it by selling my work to large corporations is wrong. But if they really wanted to do what the article says, create a project and people can donate what the want. For example, if M/S sends me $5 per month, I can redirect it to various open source projects instead. When I was on GH, I did donate a little per month to 2 projects, it was a nice way to do that. But I moved off because I do not want to give M/S more personal information (like my Cell #), so I send a few $ to them using other means.
• QuadmasterXLII 9mo ago
  The first order effect of this would be great, but the following onslaught of schlinkert spam would be devastating- its bad enough now with people making garbage dependencies and sneaking them in everywhere just for clout
  • Aurornis 9mo ago
    Sadly I think this is true. There is already a problem with people making useless dependencies and pushing them into projects with PRs to increase their download numbers. Showing high download numbers on your resume is more valuable than anything a fund like this could provide. There will always be a company who views high NPM download numbers as a signal of top 1% talent, even if it has become a game in itself.
  • abraham 9mo ago
    It might make the maintainers of if the rest of the pie vigilant for dependency spam that would cut into their end.
    • QuadmasterXLII 9mo ago
      Well now you've got me wondering.
• falloutx 9mo ago
  I do like this idea, as it seems easy to implement. Github can just increase its prices by $1/month/orguser and that fund could end up with like, i think, 6 million per month. Thats a sizeable amount of money and could help in making open source more sustainable & attractive.
• Dilettante_ 9mo ago
  >it is not okay to consider that this labor fell from the sky and is a gift, and that the people/person behind are just doing it for their own enjoyments Yes it absolutely is. That is the exact social contract people 100% willingly enter by releasing something as Free and Open Source. They do give it as a gift, in exchange for maybe the tiny bit of niche recognition that comes with it, and often times out of simple generosity. Is that really so incredible?
  • Aurornis 9mo ago
    Agreed. Supporting open source maintainers is a great idea in general, but shaming people for using something according to the exact license terms it was released with is getting old.
  • nonethewiser 9mo ago
    It's crazy to expect someone to pay for something that you're giving them for free.
    • patmorgan23 9mo ago
      Correct, but if there's a bug/enhancement/support they want, it's perfectly reasonable to ask for compensation for it.
  • securesaml 9mo ago
    The problem is more so maintenance. The expectation of FOSS is that the users and maintainer work together to resolve bug fixes/features/security issues. However many companies will dump these issues to the maintainer and take it for granted when they are resolved. It's not a sustainable model, and will lead to burnout/unmaintained libraries. If the companies don't have the engineering resources/specialization to complete bug fixes/features, they should sponsor the maintainers.
    • strongpigeon 9mo ago
      It’s OK to say “No” or “Pay me and I’ll do it right now” to companies doing this.
• grayhatter 9mo ago
  > it is not okay to consider that this labor fell from the sky and is a gift, and that the people/person behind are just doing it for their own enjoyments. I am. I enjoy making things, and it's even better when others enjoy them. Just because you have expectations that you should be compensated for everything line of code you write; doesn't make it ubiquitous, nor should your expectations be considered the default. I'd argue If you're creating and releasing open source with the expectations of compensation, you're doing it wrong. Equally, if you expect someone creating open source owes you anything, you're also part of the problem, (and part of why people feel they deserve compensation for something that used to be considered a gift). All that said, you should take care of your people, if you can help others; especially when you depend on them. I think you should try. Or rather, I hope you would.
  • Barbing 9mo ago
    Redistributing unwanted funds would be a good chore to have to do!
  • pixelready 9mo ago
    I think this is the piece so many that are stuck in the hustle culture mindset miss, and why they are so quick to dismiss anything like UBI or a strong social safety net that might “reduce people’s motivation”. There are many many creative, caring people that are motivated to create things or care for each other for the sake of it, not for some financial reward. Imagine the incredible programs, websites, games, crafts, artworks, animations, performances, literature, journalism, hobby clubs, support groups, community organizations that would spring into existence if we all just had more bandwidth for them while having our baseline needs met. Would it be chaotic? Sure, in the same way that open source or any other form of self-organization is. But boy it sounds a whole lot better than our current model of slavery-with-extra-steps…
    • ThrowawayR2 9mo ago
      The hikikomori[1] or NEETs ought to be a hotbed of creative works if your hypothesis is true. And they aren't, plain and simple. There is effectively zero evidence suggesting a population on UBI will result in some sort of outpouring of creativity. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori and it's not a phenomenon limited to Japan.
• verdverm 9mo ago
  I'd support this if only to end the nightmare that is the JS ecosystem
• PaulHoule 9mo ago
  Schemes like this have a way of getting captured.
• amarant 9mo ago
  You do not want to add profit incentives like this to FOSS. Profit incentives like the one suggested is what brought us enshitification. And the code is a free gift, unless the licence says otherwise. What's wrong with letting developers choose what to bill for?
  • axel479343 9mo ago
    You are absolutely right
• olalonde 9mo ago
  > Those funds would then be distributed by usage - every mention in a package.json or requirements.txt gets you a piece of the pie. Usage is not a good proxy for value or ongoing effort. I have a npm package with tens of millions of weekly downloads. It's only a few lines long and it's basically done - no maintenance required. I'm skeptical that there exists an algorithmic way to distribute funds that's both efficient and resistant to gaming.
• ndr 9mo ago
  Static rules will be gamed. It's easy to predict what sort of incentives this would produce, and how bad they would be. Fewer users and way more spammy projects to say the least. GH could easily end up having to spend more than it collected in fighting abuse.
• lm28469 9mo ago
  >it is not okay to consider that this labor fell from the sky and is a gift, and that the people/person behind are just doing it for their own enjoyments Goodbye 90% of open source software I guess then
• ProofHouse 9mo ago
  [flagged]
• KaiserPro 9mo ago
  <humour> sounds like socialism amirite?</humour> In principle it sounds like a grand idea, although there are a bunch of corner cases like how it works cross country borders, and de-anonymising maintainers. If it was opt in for opensource projects, and there are strong guards against people forking/hard takover-ing then yes, it seems like a good idea in principle. I will leave the AI enthusiasts to chime in about the future, and how we don't need OS anymore.
• preommr 9mo ago
  Instead of a dollar from github users, I think it should just be a hefty tax on big tech companies that have valuations of over a billion. The nature of software and tech means that there are massive monopolies where winner takes all. We should just accept that and leverage it.
• nonethewiser 9mo ago
  >It is crazy, absolutely crazy to depend on open source to be free (as beer). Why? It's not crazy at all. It's the status quo with no sign of things changing. It is both possible right now and likely continue. Its not crazy. If it's not worth maintaining people will stop. If people need it they will develop it. The current incentive structure has produced lots of open source code that is being maintained. >It is not okay - it is not okay to consider that this labor fell from the sky and is a gift, and that the people/person behind are just doing it for their own enjoyments. It is if there is no cost. You can always charge for it. But you can't make it free then pretend its not.
• drdrey 9mo ago
  the problem with any approach like this based on usage metrics is that it will be abused to death
• wiether 9mo ago
  > Those funds would then be distributed by usage - every mention in a package.json or requirements.txt gets you a piece of the pie. Could have worked before LLMs. Also, funding by popularity would mean alternatives would have a harder time to emerge and get the funding they need to compete against the established popular projects. Being an Open Source project doesn't mean that it provides the best solution to the problem it's supposed to solve. Diversity is important.
• lars_francke 9mo ago
  This is a terrible idea in my opinion and it's been tried/is being tried by services like thanks.dev. Yes, we need something here but this is not it. The reality is more complex. It doesn't work well in practice. Because then people like https://github.com/sindresorhus?tab=repositories&type=source https://github.com/sindresorhus?tab=repositories&type=source would get a shit ton of money because of the pure number of dependencies. And yes our stack also contains his code somewhere in a debug UI but our main product is entirely written in a different programming language with way fewer dependencies but if one of them goes away we'd be in trouble. In other words: Dependency count is not a good metric for this. GitHub actually offers something in that direction: https://github.com/sponsors/explore https://github.com/sponsors/explore My "idea": Lots of companies will have to create SBOMs anyway. Take all of those but also scan your machines and take all the open source software running on there (your package.lock does not contain VLC etc.) and throw it in a big company wide BOM, then somehow prioritise those using algorithms, data and just manual voting and then upload that to some distributor who then distributes this to all the relevant organisations and people and then (crucially) sends me (as a company) an invoice. We've tried doing the right thing but sponsoring is hard - it works differently for every project/foundation and the administrative overhead is huge. The reality is that "we" as an open-source community suck at taking money and I believe this is partially on us.
  • manuelmoreale 9mo ago
    > The reality is that "we" as an open-source community suck at taking money and I believe this is partially on us. More broadly people suck at giving money for things they can get for free. That’s just the reality of how most people out there behave. The only “solution” is to educate people but that is completely unfeasible.
• rglullis 9mo ago
  One thing I thought that got me interested about Brave was this part of their business modell. It had the potential to support this type of economy almost without any attrition. It was not that different from flattr, with the difference that people would be able to contribute just by accepting the notification ads and passing along their earnings. Unfortunately, the crypto angle made sure that mostly degens and speculators got into it. Perhaps if stabletokens were more established by the time they started, it would be easier to market it. (I am not going to get into yet-another discussion about Brave as a company. I will flag any attempt at derailing the conversation.)
• primitivesuave 9mo ago
  If this actually happens, get ready for an avalanche of AI-generated garbage code that exists for the sole purpose of boosting a scammer's metrics, so they can maximize their slice of the pie with the minimum amount of effort. Spotify is dealing with this same issue around AI-generated music [1]. 1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/lesliekatz/2024/09/08/man-charged-with-10-million-streaming-scam-using-ai-generated-songs/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/lesliekatz/2024/09/08/man-charg...
  • captn3m0 9mo ago
    Tea.xyz already slopped this: https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=teaxyz-spam https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=teaxyz-spam
  • stogot 9mo ago
    Spotify is creating their own AI slop music aren’t they?
• hamdingers 9mo ago
  Many open source projects are created by engineers being paid to solve a problem their employer has, and they just happen to release it freely. I don't think Google needs a dollar every time I write a script in golang or run a container in kubernetes, and I would put a lot less trust in Envoy if I thought Lyft was building it profit and not because they needed to.
• jillesvangurp 9mo ago
  OSS works partially because a lot of stuff is free as in beer. I rely on probably many thousands of OSS projects directly or indirectly on a daily basis. So does everyone else. The problem for some people is that they want to get paid for their work and just aren't; or not enough. I won't judge that. Writing software is hard work. Whether you donate your time and how much of your time is a personal choice to make. But of course a lot of OSS gets paid for indirectly via companies paying people to work on them (most long lived projects have paid contributors like that) or in a few cases because the companies behind these projects have some business model that actually works. Some people donate money to things they like. And some projects are parked under foundations that accept donations. That's all fine. But there are also an enormous amount of projects out there and most of them will never receive a dollar for any of it. OSS wouldn't work without this long tail of unpaid contributors. I have a few OSS projects of my own. I don't accept donations for them. I don't get paid for them. I have my own reasons for creating these projects; but money isn't one of those. And people are welcome to use them. That's why these projects are open source. MS and Github make loads of money. There's a reason they give the freemium version away for free: it funnels enough people into the non free version that it is worth it to them. Charging money to everyone might actually break that for them. I happily use their freemium stuff. I did pay for it a long time ago when private projects weren't part of the freemium layer. Anyway their reasons/motivations are theirs. I'm sure it all makes sense for them and their share holders. If people feel guilty about not donating to each of the thousands of projects they rely on (or any, because why cherry pick?), you can pay back in a different way and try to contribute once in a while. Just pay it forward. Yes you somebody put a lot of work in the stuff that you use. And you put some work in stuff that others get to use. If enough people keep on doing that (and the success of OSS hints that they do), OSS will be here to stay.
  • luqtas 9mo ago
    > OSS will be here to stay OSS literally runs the modern infrastructure... https://www.fordfoundation.org/learning/library/research-reports/roads-and-bridges-the-unseen-labor-behind-our-digital-infrastructure/ https://www.fordfoundation.org/learning/library/research-rep...
• notepad0x90 9mo ago
  the payment isn't the problem so much as the payment processing. They wouldn't support crypto, even if they did, getting crypto without KYC hassle is a PITA, not worth it for paying one company $1. Not associating your real identity with a github repo is very important to most github users. Payment could solve lots of problems, but there is no real and meaningful cash-equivalent payment system or method. This isn't a tech problem either, governments allow cash payments, but if it is digital, they won't allow any means that preserves privacy. Money laundering is their concern. You can't solve this without laws changing. Even if I don't mind buying crypto with a credit card, I still have to go through proving my identity with my id card, as if my credit-card company didn't do that already. payment is a huge barrier to commerce these days, people think LLMs will change the world, but payment tech/laws will have a bigger effect in my opinion. Let's say HN mods go a little crazy one day and want to let us tip each other for good posts and comments, imagine if all they had to do is add an html tag in the right place and that's it. All we had to do is click a button and it just works, and there is no exposure of private information by any involved party, and you could fund that payment by buying something (a card?) at a convenience store in person, just as easily as you could with a crypto payment, moneygram or wire transfer. I __want__ to pay so many news sites, blogs,etc... I don't mind tipping a few bucks to some guy who wrote a good blog, or who put together a decent project on github that saved me lots of time and work. It isn't merely the change in economics or people getting a buck here and there, but the explosion in economic activity you have to look at. The generation of wealth, not the mere zero-sum transferring of currency. This is the type of stuff that changes society drastically, like freeways being invented, women being able to ride bicycles, airplanes allowing fast transport, telegrams allowing instant messaging,etc.. Everyone being able to easily pay anyone at all, including funding private as well as commercial projects would be more disruptive than democracy itself, if I could dare make that claim. There is freedom of movement, there is freedom of communication and last there is freedom of trade. these are the ultimate barriers to human progress. Imagine if everyone from texas to beijing could fund research and projects, trade stocks in companies (all companies in the world). You won't need governments to fund climate change work, I think eventually taxation itself will have to suffer, because people would be able to direct exactly where their funds went. Not just what department in the government gets a budget, but exactly what projects they spend it on. being able to not just talk or meet each other instantly (and even those have a long way to go) but to also collectively or as individuals found each other, governments and companies, that'd be the biggest thing that could happen this century. This could be done, but again, we don't need better tech as much as we need a change in attitude. For people to actually believe this would result in a better world for them.
• bArray 9mo ago
  $1 USD is ~90 Indian Rupees, 1450 Argentinian Peso or over 1 million Iranian Rial [1]. In some places, $1 USD could be a week's work. On the collection side, you could be seriously over-charging people. On the distribution side, you could be seriously overpaying people for their work - and encourage scams, etc. > GitHub should charge every org $1 more per user per month and direct it into an Open Source fund, held in escrow. Sure. It'll be some charity, then somebody gets paid $200k+ per year to distribute what remains after they've taken the majority, all whilst avoiding most taxes. To receive the money the person has to ID themselves, financial background checks need to be done, a minimum amount needs to be reached before a payment is made, and then after passing through multiple wanting hands, they end up with a fraction. > Those funds would then be distributed by usage - every mention in a package.json or requirements.txt gets you a piece of the pie. What even is "usage"? How many times it appears in a number of repos? How many users there are of the project? Is the usefulness and value of a project limited to the number of people that directly use it? > Or don’t! Let’s not do anything! People’s code and efforts - fueling incredibly critical bits of infrastructure all around the world - should just be up for grabs. Haha! Suckers! > Anyway, you all smarter than me people can figure it out. I just cannot accept that what we have is “GOOD”. xx It's entirely possible you can make things worse by avoiding doing nothing. Sometimes in life you have to pick the lesser of evils. [1] https://www.x-rates.com/table/?from=USD&amount=1 https://www.x-rates.com/table/?from=USD&amount=1
• smcleod 9mo ago
  Tax large companies properly then you don't have to tax the public for things like this.
• init0 9mo ago
  npm funds is that to a certain extent -> https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v11/commands/npm-fund https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v11/commands/npm-fund
• blindstitch 9mo ago
  If you make every single person go through Github's miserable auth process just to do git pull, they are going to leave
• thrawa8387336 9mo ago
  You mean Microsoft?
• Lramseyer 9mo ago
  > every mention in a package.json or requirements.txt OK, what about those of us who aren't writing libraries? As a personal anecdote, the amount of opportunities that have been opened up to me as a result of my open source project are worth way more than any $1 per mention or user.
• dbbk 9mo ago
  This... exists? Did they even search for it? https://github.com/open-source/sponsors https://github.com/open-source/sponsors
  • gregsadetsky 9mo ago
    Yes, it's a step in the right direction. However it is opt-in aka "Launch a page in minutes and showcase Sponsors buttons on your GitHub profile and repositories". That's effort & friction and only simplifies the "begging" aspect that I am (strongly) reacting to. https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v11/commands/npm-fund https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v11/commands/npm-fund will also "list all dependencies that are looking for funding in a tree structure" I want the step (or 5 steps) after that. Charge first, then distribute.
• ekjhgkejhgk 9mo ago
  BRB donating to Forgejo.
• tshaddox 9mo ago
  The transitive nature of dependencies makes fund allocation extremely wonky. Say you have Next.js as a dependency in your package.json file? How many dependencies does Next.js itself have? What portion of your funds go to Next.js versus all the transitive dependencies of Next.js?
• zzzeek 9mo ago
  $5 a month per dependency, OK let's go! Hold up I've just reorganized my packages into sqlalchemy-base, sqlalchemy-core-sql, sqlalchemy-orm, sqlalchemy-oh-you-want-deletes-also, sqlalchemy-fewer-bugs, and about eight more
• axel479343 9mo ago
  let everything be gratis and if you need something fixed, and engineer you hired to work for you in your org can fork or send in a patch. there, I solved it
• asah 9mo ago
  love this idea on so many levels. Of course, then the fight moves to how allocation happens, and how to avoid people further gaming things like repo stars, forks, PRs, voting, dependencies, etc. in particular, there's repos with extremely high activity where funding doesn't help anyone and repos with low activity where funding ensures continuity for key components we all depend on but which are under-funded for various reasons. obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/
• Unfunkyufo 9mo ago
  Maybe it's just me, but I don't think the solution to the open source funding problem is to force people to pay for it. I think that goes against the spirit of open source. If there is forced payment, or even the expectation of payment, then we're not really doing the whole original open source thing, we're just doing bad source available commercial-ish software. I think the solution is for people to understand that open source goes both ways. Unlike what this post says, users don't owe maintainers anything, but maintainers also don't owe the users anything. If I build something cool and share it freely, why should users expect anything from me? Why should you expect me to maintain it or add the features you want? I think we need a mentality change where less is expected from maintainers, unless funding is arranged. After all, it's free and open source. No one is forcing you to use it. Don't like that I'm not actively developing it? Submit a PR or fork it. Isn't that what the original spirit of open source was? I think that open source has been so succesful and good that we've come to expect it to be almost like commercial software. That's not what it is.
  • nottorp 9mo ago
    There's also the problem of who decides who gets paid? If they pay by popularity most of my $1 would go to javascript. I'd rather it went to libraries I actually use.
    • tracker1 9mo ago
      Even though I like JS/TS, I agree... not to mention that at even 10x the suggested amount for paid accounts, or even $1 per private repo per month, it still wouldn't be significant to any individual developer... More along the lines of thanks for the cup of coffee money as opposed to income money. As suggested, I do think there should be room for grant funding, especially in the case of govts switching to open-source (LibreOffice, Linux, whatever) and open-source individuals and orgs can apply and granted each year dependent on actual use. Though, even then, govts should probably do more for funding, but I don't want a situation where the org just spends more money than they actually distribute for dev (looking at you Mozilla).
      • 9mo ago
• moffkalast 9mo ago
  > it is not okay to consider that this labor fell from the sky and is a gift, and that the people/person behind are just doing it for their own enjoyments. Is that not what most of open source is? Things people make for themselves because they either found it fun or solved their own problem, then published it for others to use for free. Most projects are not worth the bureaucratic tax related headaches the income from them would bring (maybe that's just my EU showing). What's not okay is demanding new features or to fix something urgently. That's paid territory. Honestly this post is such a shit take it's borderline intentional ragebait.
• keithnz 9mo ago
  No. I would get rid of "should" to "could" but it actually would warp the open source world once money is involved. People would start optimizing what they do to try and get a slice of the pie.
• ummonk 9mo ago
  If you willingly choose to make source code publicly available under an open source license you can’t then act all shocked that people don’t have to pay you for using that code. If you wanted to be guaranteed an income whenever your code gets used, you should have chosen a different license.
  • tonymet 9mo ago
    perfectly articulated. Moreover, the license is whatever the copyright holder wants to put into it. They can easily dual license , copy-left variants -- there are tons of licenses that provide compensation for commercial use.
  • immibis 9mo ago
    And if you're ok with not getting paid but you are shocked that corporations take it and use it in a non-FOSS-compatible way (e.g. selling their version for money) you should have used GPL instead of MIT.
• wetpaws 9mo ago
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• bsnnkv 9mo ago
  Not a great take. Corporations who use and benefit from software should be made to pay for their use of that software, but they don't want to, which is why they'll happily spend money promoting the use of corporate-friendly and maximally exploitable open source licensing among the passionate individuals who maintain the lions share of their dependency tree. https://lgug2z.com/articles/on-evils-in-software-licensing/ https://lgug2z.com/articles/on-evils-in-software-licensing/
  • spullara 9mo ago
    If you don't want to give your software away for free, don't give your software away for free. When they decide it is in their best interest to pay for it they will, i.e. support, bug fixes, changes. If you make open source software that just works they are unlikely to start writing checks nor should there be any expectation that they do that.
    • bsnnkv 9mo ago
      > If you don't want to give your software away for free, don't give your software away for free. I don't, and I spend a lot of my time and efforts encouraging others not to, and doing the work to prove out alternative models :) https://lgug2z.com/articles/normalize-identifying-corporate-devices-in-your-software/ https://lgug2z.com/articles/normalize-identifying-corporate-... https://lgug2z.com/articles/komorebi-financial-breakdown-for-2025/ https://lgug2z.com/articles/komorebi-financial-breakdown-for...
    • zemo 9mo ago
      > When they decide it is in their best interest to pay for it they will, i.e. support, bug fixes, changes. Maybe, but also maybe they just fork internally and fix the bug internally and don't publish the bugfix. And maybe it's never in their best interest to pay for it, maybe it's in their best interest to just freeload forever. > If you make open source software that just works they are unlikely to start writing checks nor should there be any expectation that they do that. I think it's good when we expect corporations to write checks to the people that write the open-source stuff they rely on. "A rising tide lifts all boats" is not automatically true in software, we have to choose to make it true. I think a world in which we make that choice is a better world. I'm not convinced we currently live in that world.
• worik 9mo ago
  This is suggesting Microsoft should take more power to itself, and disguise it as "community support"
• bahmboo 9mo ago
  The sense of entitlement is strong in these comments. If you haven’t built or maintained OSS I’m wondering why your opinion matters [edit: that's harshly worded I could have been more nuanced, hopefully the point is taken and it is a question]. There’s also the take that “this is fine” vs considering that the state of OSS things could be a LOT better with higher quality and more choices if we fed the beast properly.
  • mjr00 9mo ago
    I don't see any entitlement at all, in fact it's the opposite. The article: "I expect open source maintainers to maintain their codebases and add new features. I have unilaterally decided that $1/package is a suitable amount, universally applicable to all packages and maintainers." <--- this is entitlement The comments here: "Open source maintainers don't owe you shit."
    • bahmboo 9mo ago
      Interesting. I do not agree with your summary of his post, in fact he goes so far as to say "an idea, really. Incredibly half-baked. Poke all the holes you want. It’s very unwrought and muy unripe." So yes, we can laugh at the proposed mechanism but I feel the world would be a better place if we could funnel more resources to OSS creators rather than just take because that's an easier path.
• huflungdung 9mo ago
  [dead]
• kunley 9mo ago
  Considering that Github already has indirectly done a biggest theft in the tech history, I'd say: no way.
  • no-name-here 9mo ago
    > Github already has indirectly done a biggest theft in the tech history What is "the biggest theft in tech history" that GitHub did?
• perlgeek 9mo ago
  IMHO Open Source Software is a public good, and should be mostly funded like other public goods: through government grants. GitHub charging its users, who themselves are mostly OSS developers (and not end users) doesn't seem like a sensible solution.
• cenobyte 9mo ago
  no.
• kjgkjhfkjf 9mo ago
  Proposals like these seem to assume that FOSS is mostly produced by unpaid volunteers. But a lot of the open-source stuff that I personally use is produced by massively profitable companies. For example, I am currently working with React, which was produced by Meta. I write the code using TypeScript, which was produced by Microsoft (and other corporate behemoths such as Google). I am writing this comment in Chrome (produced by Google). Etc.
  • prussia 9mo ago
    Chrome is not FOSS btw. Google Chrome is proprietary software based on the open-source Chromium (also created by Google), which in turn is a fork of Webkit (by Apple, and with many corporate and non-corporate contributors), which itself is a fork of KHTML/KJS from the KDE project. You are still right that corporations found and contribute to countless open source projects though.
  • claudex 9mo ago
    > I am writing this comment in Chrome (produced by Google). Which depends on a lot of code not produced by Google, like libxml2 which was on the news recently because the maintainer step down.
• arjie 9mo ago
  This transformation of open-source into rent-seeking behaviour is quite distasteful to me. If you don't want to share your stuff without taxing everyone, then don't share it. Other licenses exist. You don't have to use MIT or the GPL. Meta has even demonstrated an alternative with the Llama 4 License which has exclusion criteria: > 2. Additional Commercial Terms. If, on the Llama 4 version release date, the monthly active users of the products or services made available by or for Licensee, or Licensee’s affiliates, is greater than 700 million monthly active users in the preceding calendar month, you must request a license from Meta, which Meta may grant to you in its sole discretion, and you are not authorized to exercise any of the rights under this Agreement unless or until Meta otherwise expressly grants you such rights. Go put such terms in your licenses. This is particularly rampant in the Rust community and if I'm being honest this forced tithing church nonsense from people who want to be priests makes participating in that community less desirable. I don't even want to donate to the RSF as a result. All the other projects I've donated to in the past have been much more reasonable. This kind of pushy nonsense is unacceptable.
  • zephen 9mo ago
    > If you don't want to share your stuff without taxing everyone, then don't share it. Other licenses exist. You don't have to use MIT or the GPL. I agree. Yet some of my comments here have been met with downvoting and explanations that GPL licensing is a moral imperative, so there is certainly a contingent who would disagree. > This is particularly rampant in the Rust community This is interesting. Do you have examples? I am not cognizant enough of interactions there.
    • arjie 9mo ago
      Yeah, there's a HN comment where someone is complaining about a related concept but in the linked threads there you have a lot of these donation inquisitors. I shy away from any such community. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46048954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46048954
      • zephen 9mo ago
• Davidbrcz 9mo ago
  Taxes, that's called taxes.
• tracker1 9mo ago
  So you sprinkle a few tens of thousands of dollars across a few hundreds of thousands of developers every month? Thanks for the $0.48 Github. s/thousands/millions/ the point stands that there are way more devs than commercial accounts, and even then, even if it's 1:1, you get $1?
  • GorbachevyChase 9mo ago
    Have a glass of water on us, friend!
• stravant 9mo ago
  This would not fund the people you want it to fund. Bad or borderline actors would be so much better at creating whatever metrics you're basing things off of that the actual value creators wouldn't stand a chance.
• wang_li 9mo ago
  How much was left-pad worth? Lots of people used it because it's free, not because it's valuable.
• kekqqq 9mo ago
  If you pay for it to gain the access, then it is not open source. In open source, everyone can access it and contribute (in theory).
• jamietanna 9mo ago
  I've spent a bit of time thinking about this[0] - as a maintainer (oapi-codegen, Renovate, previously Jenkins Job DSL Plugin and Wiremock), as someone who used to work on "how can we better fund our company's dependencies", and building projects and products to better understand dependency usage As others have noted, there are a few areas to watch out for, and: - some ecosystems have more dependencies over fewer, and so we need to consider how to apply a careful weighting in line with that - how do we handle forks? Does a % of the money go to the original maintainers who did 80% of the work? - how can companies be clever to not need to pay this? - some maintainers don't want financial support, and that's OK - some project creators / maintainers don't get into the work for the money (... because there is often very little) - there's a risk of funding requirements leading to "I'm not merging your PR without you paying me" which is /not problematic/ but may not be how some people (in particular companies) would like to operate [0]: https://www.jvt.me/posts/2025/02/20/funding-oss-product/ https://www.jvt.me/posts/2025/02/20/funding-oss-product/
• morshu9001 9mo ago
  How about GitHub stops using GPL'd code to train models? The authors weren't asking for payment, they were just asking not to reuse their code without GPL.
• juancn 9mo ago
  GitHub cannot see enterprise repos. Those are purposely kept on-prem.
• cush 9mo ago
  ...With absolutely nothing expected in return. This is for work completed, not for leverage on future work
• jstummbillig 9mo ago
  That would be fun. Could over time round roughly to charging everyone to fund the use of GitHub Copilot to work on open source.
• enricotr 9mo ago
  GitHub should be gradually substituted by some other providers, decentralized.
• JacoboJacobi 9mo ago
  I've seen plenty of cases of making something a target where quality won't be measurable and immediately cut off the reward or apply penalties. I don't really want Microsoft to run a large fund that encourages people to try to take over roles and request cash, etc. Literally anyone could create a support and maintenance organization that takes MIT license projects into an AWS like split and only get paid if the support they provide remains valuable to people who pay for the value of the support and maintenance.
• overfeed 9mo ago
  Tech guy reinvents half-assed taxes. More at 11. Government grants can be used to cover infrastructural open source. Not every open source wants money, so this scheme has ro be opt-in. Further, entitled "paying" users[1] will make things much worse for small projects. "I paid for this package, so you need to fix this show-stopper bug before we ship on Friday" Having a passion project is great, having it gain traction is even better, but that is not sufficient to make it a job / company. The utility of open source projects range from "I could implement the bits I use in under an hour" to "It would take 100-person team years".
• paul_h 9mo ago
  How bold to start with "Listen to me" then jump into something that doesn't make much economic sense and has not been properly considered
  • yallpendantools 9mo ago
    In fairness TFA: > Hence, a solution. Or an idea, really. Incredibly half-baked. Poke all the holes you want. It’s very unwrought and muy unripe.
• keybored 9mo ago
  Every day, millions go to work because they have to eat. Every day, thousands (?) go to their computers in their free time and make OSS software. Not because they have to eat but because [?]. Then they or others complain that people take their work that they do for free under no duress for free. Maybe economists could do what is ostensibly their job and try to prevent the “tetris game of software depending on the OSS maintained by one guy in Nebraska...” situation. In the meanwhile people who do things under no duress for free could stop doing it. (Not that OSS is all hobby activities. There are many who are paid to do it. But these appeals only talk about the former.)
• woodruffw 9mo ago
  Being on both sides of the open source value relationship, I feel somewhat skeptical of mechanisms that use dependency cardinality/"popularity" to allocate funding: at its best it's a proxy for core functionality (which is sometimes, but not always, the actually hard/maintenance-intensive stuff) and at its worst it incentivizes dependency proliferation (since two small core packages would be equally as popular as one medium-sized one).
• tonymet 9mo ago
  Or the copyright holders can start dual licensing their software for commercial use license A is GPL or MIT for academic and free applications License B is for commercial use, with a fee The license is literally whatever you want to put into it. IMO the issue is with the open source community gatekeeping these policies. Shaming developers for proposing commercial licensing, then shaming corporations for properly using the IP according to the free license (e.g. MIT)
• dj_gitmo 9mo ago
  If this ever happened I imagine private equity would begin taking control of open source projects.
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• tobadzistsini 9mo ago
  Github should charge everyone $1 more to disable Copilot on accounts.
• einpoklum 9mo ago
  > It is crazy, absolutely crazy to depend on open source to be free (as beer). It is also kind of crazy to want Microsoft to manage FOSS taxation and funding.
• bitbasher 9mo ago
  I have a better idea-- why doesn't GitHub (that closed source platform) donate 20% of all revenue to opensource projects that enable the company to exist?
• alex_young 9mo ago
  An Open Letter to Hobbyists has a similar ring to it: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/surf/072397mind-letter.html https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/su...
• maxdo 9mo ago
  I think we sometimes treat "open" as automatically good without examining the tradeoffs. You can easily sponsor Iran or Russia killing real people by doing such things. Powerful tools, once released, can be used by anyone, including those with harmful intentions. And let's be honest: much of open source functions as a way for large companies to cut costs on essential but non-differentiating infrastructure. That's fine, but it complicates the idealistic narrative. With generative AI, these questions matter more. Maybe it's time to revisit what open source should mean in this context.
• hartjer 9mo ago
  Yeah ask Microsoft to charge everyone $1/m more, what could go wrong. They didn't coin the phrase "embrace, extend, extinguish" or anything
  • MonkeyClub 9mo ago
    Even better. Have Microsoft charge people $ for their repos, and then take their code to train their LLM for more $. And they can use the surplus $ to fund open source projects to produce more code to train their LLM for even more $, and reduce their taxes thanks to the charitable donations. Everyone wins, right? Thankfully we still have Codeberg.
• heliumtera 9mo ago
  ok greg i made my repository public where is my stinky money?
• marginalia_nu 9mo ago
  Been living off grants and donations for a few years now. My 2c is you probably don't need to invent a new platform to fund open source development. There are tons of platforms and systems in place already. That's not's what's missing. You need to get open source developers that want to get paid for their work to spell that fact out to their users and supporters. Yes this is uncomfortable, but the simple fact is that if you don't tell anyone you want to get paid, you probably won't be given any money. Standard seem to be maybe there's a donation link somewhere on the site, buried 4 clicks deep in the FAQ, more often than not something like a paypal. The reality is that if you do ask for money, surprisingly often people will straight up just give you money if they like what you're doing. Like people get paid real money for screaming at video games on Twitch, meanwhile you're building something people find useful. Of course you can make money off it. But you gotta ask for it, the game screamers on twitch sure do. That's the secret. Sure there's a scale from asking for donations and doing a Jimmy Wales and putting a your face on a banner begging for donations; and while going full jimbo is arguably taking it too far, it's also probably closer to the optimum than you'd imagine. If you have corporate users, word on the street is you can also just reach out to them and ask for sponsorship. They're not guaranteed to say yes, but they're extremely unlike to sponsor you spontaneously.
  • aitchnyu 9mo ago
    Krita put a fee on Steam and Windows store, their team doubled from 2 to 4. https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/d2ic2e/krita_is_now_for_sale_on_steam_for_linux/ https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/d2ic2e/krita_is_now_...
• philippz 9mo ago
  I honestly believe this is a great idea and of course you can make it opt-in and opt-out but it should be a default or enforcable by repo-owners.
• timcobb 9mo ago
  This is the classic "if everyone gave 5 cents" thing. But If GitHub charged $1 more per month, how would they raise prices later then?
• corvad 9mo ago
  Open source work is not a product, it is a gift to the community with no strings attached, and that goes both ways. You don't ask people who give you a gift to then unbox it, set it up, and maintain it for you.
• UqWBcuFx6NV4r 9mo ago
  No idea why this has got the traction it has. Absurd and poorly thought through. It sounds like you don’t like building open source software, so stop doing it. Don’t write a blog post whining about the cage you have shut yourself in. Absolute martyr complex.
• 7ynk3r 9mo ago
  free market. go and charge.
• INTPenis 9mo ago
  I'm not a fan of Github, I prefer to promote the competition, and I'm definitely not a fan of Microsoft, but Github is already sponsoring open source with unlimited repos. So this is a weird statement to me, like you always want more.
• conartist6 9mo ago
  There's Drips that kinda works like this I think
• hmokiguess 9mo ago
  Oh, I know! Let’s redistribute royalty payments from AI subscriptions in Spotify-fashion from OpenAI and friends to developers, kind of like how Spotify pays artists for streams we get a cut of the token. Oh wait… no one’s profitable yet. Right.
• Halan 9mo ago
  GitHub already charges organisations to fund open source features. Otherwise it wouldn't lack so many enterprise level features, it wouldn't have half baked solution that do not take into consideration enterprise requirements. GH Actions for example is still not there yet after years
• rvprasad 9mo ago
  While delegating fund collection and disbursement to one organization reduces overhead for each project, the centralized nature of the setup can be asking for trouble. Instead, why not accept the reality that 1) projects may charge for their offerings and 2) users may have to pay for such offerings? As a user, if a project's offering is useful to me, then I should be willing to pay for it. As a creator, if I want to get paid for my offering, then I should be willing to ask for it. An upside of such a change could be that we start being more focused and prudent about what we use and create. Without such delegation, projects will have to do the heavy lifting in terms of collection of funds; features such as sponsorship in GH or setting up e-payments via Stripe or Paypay may help reduce this brunt.
• smashah 9mo ago
  No. Take some of that enterprise cash and lay it aside on a daily lottery which devs automatically enter based on usage metrics. And a bit more enterprise aside to give directly to the customers' deep dependency maintainers (which gh already knows).
• senko 9mo ago
  Let's rephrase this a bit so I'm sure I understand. Microsoft, a $3.4T company, should charge people for open source they didn't even write? Hell no. Hell no.
  • yallpendantools 9mo ago
    That's a mischaracterization of TFA's point. Your re-phrase makes it sound like the proposal is for filthy-rich Microsoft to pocket additional bucks from other people's open source work. Ostensibly, yes, Microsoft will be doing such action but the spirit of TFA is more like for Microsoft to act as a tax collector and, crucially, redistribute the collected tax back to the community---the money will not add to Microsoft's $3.4T-worth coffers! Naturally this comment isn't a "fuck yes!" to the idea of Microsoft-as-tax-collector but if we're discussing TFA, let's not be needlessly cynical to the idea presented.
    • zephen 9mo ago
      The comment you responded to may have incorrectly assumed that all the problems were self-evident, but apparently they are not. > redistribute the collected tax back to the community---the money will not add to Microsoft's $3.4T-worth coffers! Ummm, yeah, no. Microsoft is a contributor to many open source projects, so it could, in fact, directly add to its own coffers. And, the onus to pay for what was nominally free software could make paid software look more attractive, so it could indirectly push people to, e.g., office subscriptions.
• seanclayton 9mo ago
  UBI solves a lot of this, no?
• bpiroman 9mo ago
  This is the same rationale for governments raising taxes.
• tjwebbnorfolk 9mo ago
  I donate to specific projects through OpenCollective. I do not want Github to take extra money from me and then redistribute it to projects I don't care about according to some formula that will inevitably be exploited to get free $$$. If you want to support a project, submit a PR or send them a check. Don't force me do it for you.
  • prussia 9mo ago
    Amen, GitHub is already a faustian bargain for FOSS projects, this kind of thing will just entrench it further.
• bigfatkitten 9mo ago
  > Alright, I don’t know how you fund Linux (does Linux appear in a requirements file). Hmm. By paying companies like Red Hat, Canonical, Google and Amazon, who in turn spend massive amounts of money employing software developers to work on Linux.
• soorya3 9mo ago
  Why not just offer dual license open source + commercial license. If anyone is making money off the code they should pay annual fee which goes to contributors. Github can setup an escrow, manage licenses and distribute the money to contributors.
• irjustin 9mo ago
  Make it opt-in and I'm all for it. The REAL problem becomes, who gets funding? ouch
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• skybrian 9mo ago
  I wouldn't want some committee to decide who gets the money. It would make more sense to promote Github sponsorship. Suppose they occasionally gave all subscribers a $10 credit that they could use to sponsor whatever projects they want? https://docs.github.com/en/sponsors/sponsoring-open-source-contributors/sponsoring-an-open-source-contributor-through-github https://docs.github.com/en/sponsors/sponsoring-open-source-c...
  • saxenaabhi 9mo ago
    yes and I think animejs and others used this modal effectively.
• trueismywork 9mo ago
  Fucking lol. They should pay people for services people give them for free.
• avaer 9mo ago
  No, Github should pay open source per inference token. It'll never happen; open source doesn't have the legal team of Disney [1]. [1] https://openai.com/index/disney-sora-agreement/ https://openai.com/index/disney-sora-agreement/
• burnt-resistor 9mo ago
  Sounds like force with a Hobson's choice. And who decides who gets how much? This is a common anti-pattern of utopian, this will work this time(tm), improperly-educated dreamers who are much too comfortable with totalitarianism like taking money, property, and rights from others without asking for their consent. Robbing peasants to build palaces and pet projects. Maybe start with "demanding" every big company fund them than taxing average people. This is so dumb.
• zzo38computer 9mo ago
  I do not agree. It should not be opt-out. If you want funding, make it opt-in. I do not want to be paid for it, and I also do not want to pay for it (and I also do not want to have too many dependencies, even if I do not have to pay for it). Also, not all programs use package.json and requirements.txt, so that won't work anyways.
• self_awareness 9mo ago
  This would be terrible. People would milk the system as much as they could, only to become the most popular library, only to get most of the "pie". I guess Python/JS devs would get the most of it. Because their ecosystem is most fragmented. C++ or assembly devs? Nothing. I don't think this idea is thought out. Money corrupts things. There already is a "market" for stars. But if stars would indicate how much someone earns, it would be morbid. Well, in some way, I guess they already do, but it's linked at least indirectly.
• anon5739483 9mo ago
  I'd rather have GitHub completely shut down than to donate ¢1 to any npm project.
• ianso 9mo ago
  I think there could be a GH feature request that could do something like this in my opinion (opt-in though, not opt-out). In my personal GH account there is a "sponsor" button that shows me what dependencies I have that I could sponsor. Unfortunately the list is empty. My _organisations_ have hundreds of repo's, but there's no "sponsor" option at the org level in GH that says what dependencies the orgs use and then set up batch transactions at that level. The dependency data already exists in dependabot for a lot of stuff, so it wouldn't be starting from scratch.
• blubber 9mo ago
  Or Microsoft could simply fund open source software since they provide a Linux subsystem to allow people to do proper work despite of them having to use windows
• YetAnotherNick 9mo ago
  People in tech thinks that micropayments work. Even if you leave out the drop off in entering card details, it just doesn't work, as if get some payment you are much more liable by law. e.g. Whatsapp is the closes example, which had cost of revenue of $52M for revenue of $10M[1] in the last filing. [1]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680114000047/exhibit991auditedwhatsappi.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680114...
• 7bit 9mo ago
  No, they shouldn't. Microsoft has so much money, they couldn't spend it in a thousand years. Much of that money earned, because they had not have to spend it on developers because they just use open source software. They should just invest more into open source, but out of their pocket.
• 3oil3 9mo ago
  So much for freedom, I find those views a bit extremist and forcing one's opinion on everyone else.
• SPICLK2 9mo ago
  Not much money * quite a lot of people = not very much money (this holds true for all of the other times this idea has been suggested, too). And this does not take into account the various fees, taxes etc, that will be removed before any money gets into an OSS developer's bank account.
• dlahoda 9mo ago
  not all people can access usukeu based payment systems, so no. greg just proposed sanctions, more sanction. without disriminating that for some kids 1 is too much or impossible. greg why do you want more suffering to people?
• macinjosh 9mo ago
  Git is already distributed. We don’t need a hub for it. Just stop using GitHub it is a Microsoft product. Not sure how open source got bamboozled into paying rent to Microsoft of all companies.
• ericyd 9mo ago
  It's a good idea! Extra bonus: the inevitable exodus of companies moving to a different platform might reduce github's scale to a point where they can handle their own traffic (zing!)
• anacrolix 9mo ago
  YES. SOMETHING.
• awkward 9mo ago
  Deeply hate this. Just add a small fee. It's just a couple bucks. What are you, cheap? Open Source Software underwrites everything. It makes the largest human endeavors work. It makes silly ephemeral games little notes apps and digital art run. Turning maintainers into a kind of digital landlord that charges a fee is both insultingly low bore and enough to squeeze the life out of computing as a hobby.
• beeboop0 9mo ago
  [dead]
• lasgawe 9mo ago
  I am working on open source projects. I believe we need a better licensing approach for open source. The current license system only works if users actually care about licenses, but most do not. They simply copy the code and do whatever they want. Finding a solution to this problem is more important than charging money.
• nextlevelwizard 9mo ago
  If you want to make a product and sell your software, make a product and sell it. It is always people who make a thing for free then people find it useful and start using it then they start using that free and open source thing at work instead of writing a copy and that’s when the original person starts asking for donations and money. The reason your project is popular is because it is free. If it wasn’t free we would have probably written our own or used something else.
• maomaomiumiu 9mo ago
  I think that if GitHub had charged everyone from the beginning, it wouldn’t have become so popular and wouldn’t have attracted so many users. Maybe if they introduce charges now, it could work, but I’m still sure that a lot of users would drop off, and only those who are basically forced to use it would stay. And this would simply open the door for competitors to create similar products.
• richardgill88 9mo ago
  I've been thinking about this very hard problem while walking the dog. Individuals and companies love open source software, but the current donation models don’t really work. I thought this problem was bad for programming libraries (e.g. the recent Tailwind stuff), but after using Linux desktop open source—which has much less incentive for companies to donate or sponsor—oh boy, it’s bad. Open source evokes a lot of emotions, but at its core, to me, it’s two things: A collection of “features” (depending on license / governance): * You can use it for free, no matter what * You can see how it works * You can modify the software etc. These are genuinely valuable features, which is why open source has won. But these features are unavoidably coupled to business models and incentive structures for the developers who create this value. Right now, open source developers and companies can only extract a relatively small percentage of the (considerable) value they create. As a result, only very large or strategically important projects become financially sustainable. I agree with the article that the solution likely involves a different business model or incentive alignment—but this is a very hard problem. We’ve seen major business model shifts outside open source during my career: - SaaS software (used to be one-time payments) - Microtransactions in games (personally dislike them, but they radically changed incentives and revenue) These shifts are often counterintuitive and closely tied to human behavior. I don’t agree with the specific solution proposed in the article, but I don’t have a clean answer either. My best (very rough) idea: Create a non-profit that builds tooling and infrastructure to measure open source usage (tricky!). Loosely, you run something like: oss-usage And it generates a report for a machine (or an entire company): 'tailwind': 5 # units TBD 'npm': 8 'haskell': 1 Then a centralized registry where individuals and companies can disclose usage and donations: 'stripe': { usage: { 'tailwind': 5, 'npm': 40, 'haskell': 1, 'ruby': 60 }, totalDonationDollars: 100000, donationBreakdown: { 'ruby': 10000, 'haskell': 100, 'tailwind': 5000 } } 'oracle': 'not yet claimed' 'dave': { usage: { 'svelte': 20, 'pnpm': 40 }, totalDonationDollars: 100, donationBreakdown: { 'svelte': 20, 'pnpm': 40 } } Donated funds are held centrally and can be claimed by project maintainers. Companies can claim (or not) their usage. Developers can claim (or not) their projects and funds. Donations are aggregated into one transaction per month, solving the microtransaction problem. This creates a public, open record of who is funding open source. I think that could be a strong incentive for larger companies—engineers will notice when choosing where to work. Bad actors who under-donate or refuse to disclose won’t be invisible; we’ll know where they stand. Anyway - if you’ve read this far and are interested in working on or funding this idea, come find me: https://richardgill.org https://richardgill.org
• gregors 9mo ago
  This line of thinking is utterly bizarre to me. People need to stop thinking of GitHub as anything other than a typical corporation. If they could charge an additional dollar they would keep it for themselves.
• 0x073 9mo ago
  It's as dumb as the german Pauschalabgabe, where everyone is forced to pay a specific amount of money for technical devices, because there is the possibility of private copies for licenced media. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauschalabgabe https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauschalabgabe