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)
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!
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.
Funny that you mention Nebula, you might be interested in this other idea I had. Perhaps I should try contacting the Nebula team
Yes this is something I’ve already run up against. I’ve written a pretty functional scraper for donation pages. There seem to be ~6 donation platforms with the biggest one (PayPal eeugh) having 30% adoption. And yes not many have an API for one-to-many payments, although LiberaPay which comes a close second does. Hopefully if enough people use this app it’ll be lucrative enough for more projects to open LiberaPay accounts.
Yup. I wish there was an API for this. My plan right now is to scrape the debian repos as packages contain dependency information.