While this is pretty ingenious, and "solving" open source funding is a noble goal, there's a pretty practical impediment to GitRoyalty working in the real world: For new or existing projects, a big draw of open source is the on-boarding process.. You can download, install, and start playing with a library or application to see if it meets your needs with almost zero friction. And that's a big part of the selection process for any new project.

But with GitRoyalty, you can't even install the software to see if you want to use it or take a dependency on it.. without at minimum ponying up a credit card and signing up for a free trial.

My take is that this roadblock will turn away new users in sufficient numbers that it'll hurt projects with this paywall in place. Users will leave in droves for competing projects with less install friction. Not because they don't believe in paying, but because they don't know if they want to pay yet.

The projects that can afford to turn away users like this are the well-known ones with big-name maintainers, corporate sponsors, and thousands of GitHub stars. But these also happen to be the projects least in need of funding.

As difficult as it is to implement, a better place for a paywall would be after the user has installed the software, evaluated it, and decided to roll it out in production. That would bring the payment closer to the point of value, and also keep the on-boarding friction nice and low.