> > What if commercial users neglect to pay? Who will stand up for the project maintainers?
> Software developers who work for commercial entities want to pay for well maintained source available software. They understand that the situation is precarious because open source developers largely go unpaid. They also can't easily justify donations or charitable sponsorship when they work at for-profit companies.
I think this misses the issue. The issue isn't the will to pay/donate to people it's the bureaucracy of the pay companies pay for things.
If I took the output in your example in the repo (even nicely formatted in a csv with `Bob,$20,bob@paypal`) to my finance team they'd laugh me out of the room. They need Invoices/POs, they don't just send money to people's Paypal, and they definitely won't be paying anyone in BTC.
Don't get me wrong, I like the idea. It just isn't going to work for 99.99% of companies. Perhaps some combination of OpenFare and something like the article mentions could work but that's a lot of plumbing and kind of kingmakes whoever is in charge of generating those invoices and processes the payments.
Ironically I could see someone like MS/AWS being able to have the resources, if not the will to do this.