I had this idea recently: if people are willing to pay a small fee monthly for streaming services or Photoshop, surely some would also be willing to pay a similar amount for the FOSS they use. Even a few cents monthly would add up to quite a substantial sum over a vast userbase*. In light of this, I’ve started working on an app that records your app usage, and then at the end of the month splits whatever sum of money you want to donate amongst the apps in proportion to the time you spent using them.
Then it will (hopefully) let you donate to all of those projects with a single click.
Since it’s only halfway finished, I’m posting this to gague how much interest there would be in such an app. Could you could see yourself using something like this? Do you have any ideas for what I should add/change?
*(It also occurred to me that perhaps one way to fix surveillance capitalism on the internet would be if every HTTP get request came with a microtransaction (eg 0.01¢) attached; those without money would gain those 0.01¢ by seeing ads, like today)
i wouldnt personally allow any app to track my usage, but others can be different. my biggest point would be against the one click payment. i would not want any app that tracks usage to even connect to the internet, let alone anything related to payments
having donation links is good enough.
there may also be the question of how does it track the usage. running constantly in the background? ill probably want a system tray icon to indicate it then
I wouldn’t. id rather give it to some FOSS non profit that would allocate the resources intelligently tbh.
Hmm good point, it’s true that a human would probably be better at getting the most for FOSS out of your money than a dumb algorithm. Just like is the case for stock brokers
Honestly if you are interested in working on this domain. something like “amazon for red hats” sounds like a better idea. where you are able to subscribe to a organisation and he can gather feedback on what work people want the most (features and bug fixes). but only people paying money are allowed to vote. with data on which organisation are growing in their revenue and number of subscribers which is another indicator (like liberapay view income history section). and of course ability to write reviews and give ratings but again only for paying customers so there will be no review bombing.
The idea is excellent, especially factoring in the few current suggestions to retain maximum privacy.
However, I think you’re going to hit some really big hiccups when hitting the real world. Many FOSS projects may not have completely obvious donation schemes, let alone ubiquitous and automatable schemes, for starters. Even providing clean links to patreons/coffee may end up quite an obnoxious task even using machine learning to yoink links from readmes et. al… Not to say it’s impossible, I’m saying that getting an accurate pie graph is just the beginning.
In addition, the dependencies suggestion is a pretty important and massive chestnut. It will certainly turn out that many core dependencies are used a huge portion of the time. Some disproportionately so. It will also certainly be very difficult to find and include any dependencies that are compiled in to things, and may not have obvious signatures without analyzing the source.
Of course, if things are truly FOSS, these concerns should be solvable in some way or another. Just don’t be surprised if you end up having to analyze source to get a remotely complete list!
Many FOSS projects may not have completely obvious donation schemes, let alone ubiquitous and automatable schemes, for starters.
Slightly related to the topic, this weirdly also applies to bigger players. I wanted to buy a Nebula lifetime membership, wrote to support and basically went “just gimme Nebula’s bank details and I’ll order a direct banking transaction” and there was just no way, not even roundabout, for them to take my 300€ other than by me getting a credit card and paying via credit card.
I’m sure they have good reasons why they probably legally can’t just give me their bank adress (or whatever the American equivalent to IBAN is), but it’s very frustrating to be restricted like this in how I can give people money.
