| Hey, I think this is amazing! I think this has the power to transform open source development/funding in a good way. I have one question from the main page - it says you sign up for a subscription and list _your_ dependencies. Does that mean for an individual (non open source maintainer) you pose as a project and donate to your own project? It's not clear how this works as a contributor. Do I subscribe to projects, at a mininum of $15 per project? (Also does the project you're donating to itself get any money? Or is it 100% split among dependencies?) I echo the sentiment about manual allocation though. There are critical project dependencies, and there are things employed in an edge feature that devs might and could be replaced at any time, and all the way between. Right now people already have the ability to control funding - just don't use StackAid and only donate projects you feel are critical. Or they may decide to explicitly remove dependencies below some threshold. Both of these hurt the long tail. And it feels manipulative - people should have the end say in how their money is donated. Not all projects need money too. For instance, maybe project X requires a lot of manual work (curation of country/timezone datasets) and its developers no longer have time to do it on top of their day job, vs a library that's just an interface for a standard. Or maybe the devs of project Y are in an area hit by disaster and you want to increase funding to them for a while. Also, aren't bad actors _because_ of the automatic allocation? The current entirely manual allocation system doesn't really have issues of this sort. That said, I'll probably sign up for this, but if you added some options for finer control I'd be singing praises high and low. |
I think there's the risk of allocation getting out of drift with a project as the project evolves. Both from a sign up perspective and "if this requires hand tweaking, people will forget to do it" perspective having this low touch is probably important.
If there's manual allocations any automatic adjustments will affect existing allocations