alt Hacker NewsIf you're making a product, I think Kickstarter is awesome.
If you're making entertainment, I think Patreon is awesome.
If you're making OSS... I'm not sure we have a good system. Buy Me A Coffee or a TipJar... Starring a repository... They're good... but they're not enough.
Upvoting on Hacker News whenever I see something promising is another thing I do that I hope might help...
I kind of wish I could subscribe to some monthly payment that tracked my usage of OSS, and sent each a fraction of the money, and that they appraised which systems they depended on, so it flowed down to them, too, and etc...
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I like where you're going. I'm intrigued! but what would it look like? For example, curl. I use curl it's awesome. I love it. It's not at a level where I'm going to go to community meet ups for it though, but I'm super happy it exists. I can buy stickers for my laptop and do free advertising?
It's all psychological. If curl had a micropayment system and every time you used it, it cost a 10th of a penny and there's a monthly subscription. Oh God, holy hell, no! But at the same time, I don't want Daniel Stenberg to go hungry.
I've donated quite a bit through the Kofi and Tipjar payment systems for neat OSS apps I use. I agree that it's not enough, however we do have other systems in place via Github sponsorships, Patreon (consistent funding), etc.
It's up for the community to adopt those platforms for their project