alt Hacker NewsI'm thinking more about a subscription to a monthly fee that you and I and other fans of OSS voluntarily pay.
Say, I pay $10 a month. It figures out I used curl 850 times. I used gunzip 1246 times. And etc.
It may turn out that I'm donating a 10th of a penny to curl every time I use it.
Do I want to commit to donating a 10th of a penny BEFORE I can use curl each time?
No.
But if I set a flat rate of donating to OSS - $10 a month - and there were a simple tool that figured out a semi-reasonable way to allocate that money... I think that'd be neat.
Like, "Steam for Donating to OSS."
The tracking app would be pretty simple. A shim in the shell that tracks the first argument on the command line and increments a counter. Then usage stats are pushed to the service every 24 hours (or something like that).
app usage / all tracked app usage --> donation to app.
Handling the payments portion would be... nightmarish?
With crypto it would be really easy. I'd be tempted to take cash on the frontend, convert to crypto, split, then reconvert to cash and make payouts.
How do we handle registering apps that you use? What about upstream dependencies? Example: you just spun up a new React project, do we target all deps on that project? Is this only for command line? What about cron jobs, or systemd? Or that systemd service script you copied from a gist somewhere?