HN

Comments (307)

• Menu

  grayhatter
  > 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.
• Menu

  Dilettante_
  >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 enjoymentsYes 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?
• Menu

  Unfunkyufo
  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.
• Menu

  primitivesuave
  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-charg...
• Menu

  marginalia_nu
  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.
• olalonde
  > 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.
• Menu

  QuadmasterXLII
  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
• Menu

  kjgkjhfkjf
  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.
• Menu

  ummonk
  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.
• stravant
  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.
• Menu

  porise
  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.
• ndr
  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.
• Menu

  tracker1
  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?
• vlad-roundabout
  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.
• tshaddox
  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?
• ericyd
  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!)
• bigfatkitten
  > 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.
• bArray
  $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”. xxIt'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
• hamdingers
  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.
• Menu

  paul_h
  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
• maxdo
  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.
• preommr
  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.
• ianso
  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.
• rglullis
  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.)
• Menu

  arjie
  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.
• nonethewiser
  >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.
• JacoboJacobi
  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.
• jamietanna
  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 usageAs 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/
• bitbasher
  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?
• SPICLK2
  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.
• Menu

  skybrian
  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-c...
• UqWBcuFx6NV4r
  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.
• zzo38computer
  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.
• Lramseyer
  > every mention in a package.json or requirements.txtOK, 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.
• avaer
  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/
• Menu

  senko
  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.
• Menu

  jillesvangurp
  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.
• init0
  npm funds is that to a certain extent -> https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v11/commands/npm-fund
• keithnz
  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.
• tobadzistsini
  Github should charge everyone $1 more to disable Copilot on accounts.
• Menu

  bsnnkv
  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/
• dlahoda
  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?
• woodruffw
  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).
• Menu

  tjwebbnorfolk
  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.
• awkward
  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.
• blubber
  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
• 3oil3
  So much for freedom, I find those views a bit extremist and forcing one's opinion on everyone else.
• Menu

  lars_francke
  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 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/exploreMy "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.
• wiether
  > 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.
• Halan
  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
• soorya3
  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.
• alex_young
  An Open Letter to Hobbyists has a similar ring to it: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/su...
• anacrolix
  YES. SOMETHING.
• dj_gitmo
  If this ever happened I imagine private equity would begin taking control of open source projects.
• INTPenis
  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.
• corvad
  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.
• falloutx
  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.
• perlgeek
  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.
• anon5739483
  I'd rather have GitHub completely shut down than to donate ¢1 to any npm project.
• smcleod
  Tax large companies properly then you don't have to tax the public for things like this.
• enricotr
  GitHub should be gradually substituted by some other providers, decentralized.
• juancn
  GitHub cannot see enterprise repos. Those are purposely kept on-prem.
• Menu

  dbbk
  This... exists? Did they even search for it? https://github.com/open-source/sponsors
• timcobb
  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?
• morshu9001
  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.
• lm28469
  >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 enjoymentsGoodbye 90% of open source software I guess then
• mfru
  Congratulations, HN reinvented the concept of taxes!
• Menu

  rglullis
  Great. That would mean that 98% of the github users would leave it.
• macinjosh
  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.
• kekqqq
  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).
• rvprasad
  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.
• jstummbillig
  That would be fun. Could over time round roughly to charging everyone to fund the use of GitHub Copilot to work on open source.
• blindstitch
  If you make every single person go through Github's miserable auth process just to do git pull, they are going to leave
• irjustin
  Make it opt-in and I'm all for it.The REAL problem becomes, who gets funding? ouch
• PaulHoule
  Schemes like this have a way of getting captured.
• Menu

  kunley
  Considering that Github already has indirectly done a biggest theft in the tech history, I'd say: no way.
• bpiroman
  This is the same rationale for governments raising taxes.
• conartist6
  There's Drips that kinda works like this I think
• verdverm
  I'd support this if only to end the nightmare that is the JS ecosystem
• Menu

  notepad0x90
  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.
• anon
  undefined
• ekjhgkejhgk
  BRB donating to Forgejo.
• aaronblohowiak
  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.
• Menu

  hartjer
  Yeah ask Microsoft to charge everyone $1/m more, what could go wrong. They didn't coin the phrase "embrace, extend, extinguish" or anything
• overfeed
  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".
• seanclayton
  UBI solves a lot of this, no?
• 7bit
  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.
• YetAnotherNick
  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/1326801/000132680114...
• drdrey
  the problem with any approach like this based on usage metrics is that it will be abused to death
• einpoklum
  > 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.
• keybored
  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.)
• wang_li
  How much was left-pad worth? Lots of people used it because it's free, not because it's valuable.
• heliumtera
  ok greg i made my repository public where is my stinky money?
• zzzeek
  $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
• philippz
  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.
• axel479343
  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
• hmokiguess
  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.
• thrawa8387336
  You mean Microsoft?
• anon
  undefined
• smashah
  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).
• 7ynk3r
  free market. go and charge.
• tonymet
  Or the copyright holders can start dual licensing their software for commercial uselicense A is GPL or MIT for academic and free applicationsLicense B is for commercial use, with a feeThe 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)
• cenobyte
  no.
• worik
  This is suggesting Microsoft should take more power to itself, and disguise it as "community support"
• trueismywork
  Fucking lol. They should pay people for services people give them for free.
• Davidbrcz
  Taxes, that's called taxes.
• KaiserPro
  <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.
• cush
  ...With absolutely nothing expected in return. This is for work completed, not for leverage on future work
• Menu

  jmclnx
  I disagree, due to github copilot and other AI crap Microsoft is adding to GitHub, they should pay us 5 USD per month.
• self_awareness
  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.
• burnt-resistor
  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.
• moffkalast
  > 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.
• asah
  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/
• huflungdung
  [dead]
• wetpaws
  [dead]
• ProofHouse
  [flagged]
• Menu

  amarant
  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?
• Menu

  bahmboo
  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.