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 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.
Writing a scraper that would follow dependencies is definitely on the todo list. But currently I need an MVP so it just tracks flatpacks (donate links are part of their metadata).
Interesting. I might add an option for this then.