[WJW]

Machine readable definitions are nice, but I think the real problem is not that people/companies can't figure how to send money to the developer(s) of some piece of FOSS software. Rather, the problem seems to be that 1. many people and companies would prefer not to pay at all and 2. the maintainers are surely not the only ones contributing; how to pay all the rest?

I wonder how we could actually "reach" the roots of FOSS with funding. For example, the whole Faker.js thing copied their data definitions from the similarly named Ruby project, which copied them from the even earlier PHP project. How much funding do those earlier projects deserve? Which percentage do any of the ~257 contributors to Faker.js deserve? Somehow Marak does not strike me as an overly generous person.

Personally, I treat any contributions I make to FOSS more as a hobby. There are some PRs I've made in the past that fix a decent chunk of technical debt or introduce fancy new algorithms to speed up parts of the software. Those PRs were submitted without an invoice, even though I do similar work as a freelancer. If I knew the maintainers were getting significant amounts of money for their work, it would definitely not be the same feeling contributing significant chunks of work for free.

[armchairhacker]

Another issue is that many popular FOSS libraries are pretty simple, and the only reason they're popular is because the creator was the first person to come up with a (decent) implementation.

For instance colors.js basically adds ANSI escape codes to strings which is someting you can do in 1LOC. How much compensation should the person who made colors.js get?

Some projects are bigger and actually require a decent amount of effort, but still are something most programmers could put together in less than a month. For instance core-js, a JavaScript standard library. Should the creator of core-js deserve more compensation? When do you draw the line on how much payment you get for being a dependency?

[rndhouse]

It's a tough problem.

But I think mechanisms for rating software packages already exist (GitHub stars for instance). And we have reasonable metrics for whether a software package is under active development/maintenance. If we combine those two factors in deciding which dependencies to fund we might be in a reasonable place.

Any metric can be gamed of course.

[rndhouse]

> 2. the maintainers are surely not the only ones contributing; how to pay all the rest?

This is certainly a problem that I would like to address. It's important to reward/fund contributors as much as maintainers.

Donation schemes defined in code are as modifiable as any other code in the software. I would like to build a bot which will open a pull request on behalf of contributors and propose a share of donations.

[diogenesjunior]

it is much harder though.

i contribute weekly to one project, but i am not a maintainer. i could reason that my contributions to this project are worth money. being paid every month would be reasonable.

in another project, i only contribute when i run into a bug or need something added. this happens maybe 3-4 times a year. i could reason that these bug fixes and feature additions are worth money, but i would be out of line to say that a monthly amount of money is reasonable. do one time donations or 1-2x a year donations make sense?

i also have various projects where i've contributed 1-10 lines of code once and never come back. i don't deserve to be paid for those, in my opinion.

[rndhouse]

There is so much variety in how people contribute and what they hope to get out of it in a perfect world!

My goal is to put the mechanisms in place. And give people another means of self expression.

[WJW]

Should you continue to be paid for software as long as it provides value, even if you no longer work on it? That is a question that will spark ideological debates for centuries.