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by fri_sch 1651 days ago
> I think making it easier for companies to pay open source contributors is the right approach.

Making it easier and making it a common habit. Companies need to realize, that paying maintainers/contributors pays off for them.

> I would love to see a tool that, given a pool of money, will collect dependencies from projects in any language (extensible), find the authors (git commit history, etc.), find where they accept contributions (extensible), and pay them, based on both computed and hand crafted weights.

Looking at https://flossbank.com/, this seems like just what you describe. I don't know how it works exactly, though.

1 comments

> Making it easier and making it a common habit. Companies need to realize, that paying maintainers/contributors pays off for them.

Definitely agreed.

> Looking at https://flossbank.com/, this seems like just what you describe. I don't know how it works exactly, though.

That looks ... related, but I _detest_ that it relies on injecting ads into package managers. It's also not extensible.

I think an open source tool would be preferable so that incentives don't get skewed by for-profit motives.

I would also prefer if the payments didn't go through a single company. Paying developers through GitHub Sponsors, Patreon, Flattr, or whatever their preferred mechanism is.