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)

  • Sunsofold@lemmings.world
    1·
    16 hours ago

    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?