Well, i just remembered the nexus mods and vortex Mod manager business model. All downloads are counted and you are asked to give an endorsement of the mod after a period of time. There is then a option to donate and you can choose your allocation if any. Something like that could only run once per month and be able to give good info. While tracking use time can be like beneficial Spyware, I think I would still like the reminder without that service.

I could see a certain issue of disparity depending on how you count ‘use’ and I am always wary of anything that tracks what you do, but, with caveats, yes.

I’d want to see at least two things addressed before supporting:

• Privacy: As with any tracking software, I’d want it to be locally stored, and locally encrypted data. It might be useful to someone to see it but it must be opt-in to share the usage data with anyone, and I’d prefer whatever organization has access to the data only share it with not-for-profit entities, and retain revokable rights to the data such that, if it is shared with data brokers, they can be made to pay for violating those rights, along with whoever let them have the data.
• time metric: And I’d like to see some kind of adjustment for what counts as ‘use’ for different projects. Something like, say, Syncthing is ‘in use’ essentially 24/7, running in the background and only brought to the foreground occasionally, and no offense to the people who work on it, but it is relatively simple, with a most of it being file handling and net code. (Again, not knocking the developers. The work put into making these sorts of things is incredibly valuable and requires real knowledge. It just crosses fewer domains than some other projects so it serves as an example.) Compare this to, say, Godot, which is generally only run while being actively used, but requires a team that is familiar with 3D graphics, real time processing, shaders, audio, simulation, ass well as file handling and net code. Same goes for, say, LibreOffice. You can use it for 10 minutes and then close it but that can include use of features that took/take significant time and effort to create/maintain. Based on ‘use time’ you might end up sending all your donations to projects in a way that doesn’t account for other factors. I don’t like to give problems without at least considering solutions so maybe we could crowdsource a map of which software has the most demands of it’s contributors and balance things that way?

I would love an APP like this, actually thought about needing something like this a few months back.

I would use it, but I see the problems mentioned by others with giving hugely wrong incentives to devs, if the app gains traction (running in background, making slower software, hiding dependencies, etc.)

Also I dont really know if use time really is the best metric (dont know anything better though.)

Also also there would need to be a smart way to detect dependencies, forks and the like, as the frontend is often not the part which is the most work to maintain

Sounds interesting, but, I do worry, if such a system were to get any sort of significant adoption, it would create a financial incentives for projects to do questionable things.

Like, even the best intentioned dev would have a very strong incentive to intentionally make their software run in the background in a way that made it look like it was being used. And if a lot of projects did that, then, suddenly there is a bunch of always on stuff eating up system resources.

There is also potential complications around one project pressuring or paying off others to do stuff that gets them more run time. Like say, pressuring a distro or desktop to include their project as a default that turns on when ever the system starts. Or simply include their project as the default even if it’s not well suited to the task.

The incentives created by the system for devs and projects would need to be considered in aggregate, like what down steam outcomes could be created for the entire software ecosystem.

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

If it’s completely offline and the banking thing can be completely disabled it’s awesome.

I would love to know the softwares (and their dependencies) I use more so then I can decide how to donate myself. The dependencies being a big thing. Like on android I use syncthing fork, which would be nothing without syncthing. And there may be other essential stuff running on boot that I don’t know and should help.

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!

What am I gonna do with “72% Alacritty, 27% Firefox, 1% Meld, 0% Other”? I’m not gonna give Mozilla money until they pivot to browsers.

I like the idea, but i would want it to be more granular so that i also donate to all dependencies i use.

I personally also do not care about the shares each projects get so i would prefer if nothing runs in the background it only collects once a month all my installed packages and donates to them evenly.

But this is a great idea i would probably even use it without my suggested changes.

I would like to have a way to track my use of FOSS, but i want to retain my privacy. I would be interested in this app. I also would like a different way to allocate so that apps that increase my efficiency so that I don’t spend a long time troubleshooting something get the bigger slice. Perhaps having an optional “impact” survey with varying degrees of granularity (impact survy with only thumbs up and down OR impact survey with only 5 stars OR impact survey with 1-100) honestly this would be really cool if adoption got so high that this became the “patreon” of linux apps (aka having a “like” at the bottom that would remind you of high impact).

Note to self: in the settings dialog, let the user create custom donation entries with a regex to look for in ‘ps’ and a donation url.

If you could have it track browser usage too then it could donate to Lemmy, PieFed, Mbin, Mastodon, etc.

I wouldn’t. id rather give it to some FOSS non profit that would allocate the resources intelligently tbh.