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by sbr464 2706 days ago
Yet, I use eslint every day, I have money, I’m willing to pay, but I’m not familiar with the owner or his products, (nor inclined to seek them out), nor will I go find their Patreon page (although I do support several YouTuber Patreon pages).

I personally feel like npm and Github are sitting on goldmines, in a financial sense and in a simple solution sense, yet they are their own worst enemy, chasing all value to $0 as fast as possible.

GitHub/npm: just charge me $10-20+/more/month and distribute it out for me. I want to support the community, but I don’t want to deal with it. I code e-very-day. It’s worth it to me to support tools and the community, but don’t leave it up to my own arbitrary choices or timing. Maybe check my package.json or code coverage with said packages to dish out funds auto-magically. Just do something-charge me!

Side note — last week Github announced free private repos, while I was gladly paying. Why not instead just charge for the repos and create a massive fund to help solve the problem? Maybe the catch is: to receive funds you have to primarily host your source code on Github. That may help retain popular libs from leaving to other platforms.
2 comments
demircancelebi 2706 days ago
Exactly my thoughts. Considering Github's recent numbers (300M USD/year revenue) and its recent acquisition by Microsoft, something like 30M USD/year would be enough to fund 250-1000 people a year full time. Maybe there might be an upper limit on how much you can make through the platform (like 10k USD/month), so instead of ending up with a few millionaires, a 10% revenue share would be enough to fund 250-1000 people full time, much more people half-time. With such a system in place, I think everyone would be better off, including Github - Microsoft.
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pjc50 2706 days ago
> chasing all value to $0 as fast as possible.

The marginal cost of distribution of software is nearly zero. Therefore the cost of software, not just OSS, gets driven to zero. Hence why so many commercial services have switched to "advertising supported", "SaaS/hosted/online-only", or cloud subscription.

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