It’s not “the world economy depends on this stuff why is it not properly funded” (which is true) it’s “never before has a coupe of guys or girls in a garage been able to reach so many people, and stand a chance of getting funding”
The troubles people have finding ways to make a living whilst providing value to people suggests something is wrong not with them but the economy
If you're making entertainment, I think Patreon is awesome.
If you're making OSS... I'm not sure we have a good system. Buy Me A Coffee or a TipJar... Starring a repository... They're good... but they're not enough.
Upvoting on Hacker News whenever I see something promising is another thing I do that I hope might help...
I kind of wish I could subscribe to some monthly payment that tracked my usage of OSS, and sent each a fraction of the money, and that they appraised which systems they depended on, so it flowed down to them, too, and etc...
It's up for the community to adopt those platforms for their project
It's all psychological. If curl had a micropayment system and every time you used it, it cost a 10th of a penny and there's a monthly subscription. Oh God, holy hell, no! But at the same time, I don't want Daniel Stenberg to go hungry.
Say, I pay $10 a month. It figures out I used curl 850 times. I used gunzip 1246 times. And etc.
It may turn out that I'm donating a 10th of a penny to curl every time I use it.
Do I want to commit to donating a 10th of a penny BEFORE I can use curl each time?
No.
But if I set a flat rate of donating to OSS - $10 a month - and there were a simple tool that figured out a semi-reasonable way to allocate that money... I think that'd be neat.
Like, "Steam for Donating to OSS."
app usage / all tracked app usage --> donation to app.
Handling the payments portion would be... nightmarish?
With crypto it would be really easy. I'd be tempted to take cash on the frontend, convert to crypto, split, then reconvert to cash and make payouts.
How do we handle registering apps that you use? What about upstream dependencies? Example: you just spun up a new React project, do we target all deps on that project? Is this only for command line? What about cron jobs, or systemd? Or that systemd service script you copied from a gist somewhere?
At the end of the month, I'm told to donate my entire $10 to some obscure tool I've never even heard of.
The system did all of the tracking, across all users, and then figured out how to assign users like me to projects, such that I'm only donating once or twice ($6 to this project, and $4 to that project.)
The system I propose does all of the counting, all of the aggregating, matching intended donations to the recipients, and then encourages me to do my actual gifting...
Seems possible, but weird. Or maybe we need to set up a non-profit to do all this money laundering^W^W donating.
If whatever OSS is too obscure to be noticed by non-techies but still fundamental (think OpenSSL, libxz,etc) it's more likely to lead to burnout far before anyone wants to put in any sane money (curl is one of few counter-examples but that hasn't had a straight journey).
We should have a system whereby you don't die of pneumonia homeless on the street if you don't have a job. The things OSS developers do for free are of value completely incomparable with what almost all of us do in our day jobs.
People should be free to make art and music and anything else they want. People should be free to contribute to our culture and society.
Alas, someone wants to take 99% of the value of your work for themselves and give you only the barest minimum they can get away with. And if you don't comply, you don't deserve to live.