| Thanks Feross! GitRoyalty is an experiment that allows OSS project maintainers to hide a package’s manifest file (or build script) behind a monthly subscription. This way users will have to subscribe in order to install the package using dependency managers like NPM. The idea is that with low prices and the power of numbers, both popular and transitive OSS dependencies can sustain development instead of relying on a few enterprise sponsors that could influence the direction of the projects. After setting up an Individual or Team subscription, users are given a license key which is used to install a package with their dependency manager: npm i git+https://<license>@gitroyalty.com/user/repo#semver:^2.0.1
* GitRoyalty works for projects with permissive licenses like MIT or Apache 2.0, but not copyleft licenses like GPL (which most companies like Microsoft avoid completely)* While this isn’t FOSS, it keeps the best parts of open source in place (open GitHub collaboration, permissive licensing) while incentivizing users to pay contributors * Although some wildly successful OSS projects can sustain from donations, only core contributors get paid anything, when in reality there are hundreds or thousands of other developers. GitRoyalty distributes subscription earnings to all developers based on their contributions. * The barrier to subscribe and install a package is quite low, especially after adding a payment method once. Login with GitHub, hit Subscribe, install. All subscriptions come with a 2 week free trial and are charged in aggregate the 1st of every month to keep processing fees low. https://imgur.com/3WpwBUz I just set up my own 2.6k star GitHub project with GitRoyalty and have 6 subscribers so far, for a total of ~$10/month for me and my contributors. https://gitroyalty.com/saoudrizwan/Disk I hope to get more subscribers as I release more updates to my project, since any previous versions before GitRoyalty will always be free (due to the fact that previous manifest/build scripts will be in git history). Let me know what you think! I’d love for more people to try this out with even completely new projects so we can see if this experiment has potential. Obviously this won’t work for everyone but I hope it can be a solution for projects that desperately need funding and can’t find sponsors. |
As for barriers to subscribe, are you sure it's low? What do companies think of this? Aren't they going to treat this exactly the same as proprietary software? With full pre-qualification of the vendor?