[tisc]

I have been wondering about this, whether this is not simply a shift of the problem? Let’s assume we get into a world where we pay for open source. Who would we pay? The maintainer I guess. What about the contributors? When the maintainer(s) receive financial rewarding for the code, will contributors receive a part of this as well? And how would that be divided?

[iforgotpassword]

I've been thinking about this on and off. I try to support OSS (currently via Patreon only) and am currently at about 55€ per month. It is really hard to pick the right projects, because I use a lot of OSS, and it's not like I have infinite money to spend.

So right now I mostly fund smaller projects because it feels they need it more, but at the same time I think I should also consider how important some piece of software is to me, or how much I depend on it, which gets really hard as soon as you don't just include "visible" software, but also libraries. I guess I'd have a really bad time without a jpeg library, for example. But that leads into your point about rewarding contributors. Ideally, every project that receives donations will fairly redistribute a share of it to every contributor and library they depend on, but that seems absolutely impractical to get right, especially for larger projects.

Also, should you take the complexity of a project into account? Not to diminish the work of the folks behind eg libjpeg-turbo, but a jpeg encoder/decoder isn't exactly rocket science, so should they receive less than for example libx264?

So yeah, I think this is a fairly deep topic that you can put a lot of thought into, and even get a bit philosophical about. Interested to hear other people's approach to this.

[duxup]

I wonder about conflicts / arguments over money.

Gamification of contributions… shoehorning projects into other projects that get funding.

Forks just to try to rake in contributions.

Just free avoids a lot of problems, but certainly isn’t problem free.

[zrail]

I wrote an article about one possibility awhile ago. Basically, pattern off of ASCAP and learn from their mistakes.

https://www.petekeen.net/ascap-for-open-source-software

[throwaway858]

Lots of open source projects have a foundation that manages the money. The foundation decides how to allocate the funds based on what they think will provide most value to the community, whether that is covering server costs or paying specific individual contributors to write code.

Examples: Python Software Foundation, Haskell Foundation

In practice this seems to work well.

[wmf]

Everybody will be the maintainer of a one-person project.