[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.