alt Hacker NewsGitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month to fund open source
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I do like this idea, as it seems easy to implement. Github can just increase its prices by $1/month/orguser and that fund could end up with like, i think, 6 million per month. Thats a sizeable amount of money and could help in making open source more sustainable & attractive.
This... exists? Did they even search for it? https://github.com/open-source/sponsors
Considering that Github already has indirectly done a biggest theft in the tech history, I'd say: no way.
>it is not okay to consider that this labor fell from the sky and is a gift, and that the people/person behind are just doing it for their own enjoyments
Goodbye 90% of open source software I guess then
GitHub should be gradually substituted by some other providers, decentralized.
Yeah ask Microsoft to charge everyone $1/m more, what could go wrong. They didn't coin the phrase "embrace, extend, extinguish" or anything
Great. That would mean that 98% of the github users would leave it.
If you make every single person go through Github's miserable auth process just to do git pull, they are going to leave
Schemes like this have a way of getting captured.
Oh, I know! Let’s redistribute royalty payments from AI subscriptions in Spotify-fashion from OpenAI and friends to developers, kind of like how Spotify pays artists for streams we get a cut of the token. Oh wait… no one’s profitable yet. Right.
No. Take some of that enterprise cash and lay it aside on a daily lottery which devs automatically enter based on usage metrics. And a bit more enterprise aside to give directly to the customers' deep dependency maintainers (which gh already knows).
I honestly believe this is a great idea and of course you can make it opt-in and opt-out but it should be a default or enforcable by repo-owners.
Tech guy reinvents half-assed taxes. More at 11.
Government grants can be used to cover infrastructural open source. Not every open source wants money, so this scheme has ro be opt-in. Further, entitled "paying" users[1] will make things much worse for small projects. "I paid for this package, so you need to fix this show-stopper bug before we ship on Friday"
Having a passion project is great, having it gain traction is even better, but that is not sufficient to make it a job / company. The utility of open source projects range from "I could implement the bits I use in under an hour" to "It would take 100-person team years".
ok greg i made my repository public where is my stinky money?
BRB donating to Forgejo.
> It is crazy, absolutely crazy to depend on open source to be free (as beer).
It is also kind of crazy to want Microsoft to manage FOSS taxation and funding.
I'd support this if only to end the nightmare that is the JS ecosystem
Every day, millions go to work because they have to eat. Every day, thousands (?) go to their computers in their free time and make OSS software. Not because they have to eat but because [?]. Then they or others complain that people take their work that they do for free under no duress for free.
Maybe economists could do what is ostensibly their job and try to prevent the “tetris game of software depending on the OSS maintained by one guy in Nebraska...” situation. In the meanwhile people who do things under no duress for free could stop doing it.
(Not that OSS is all hobby activities. There are many who are paid to do it. But these appeals only talk about the former.)
should be the transitive dependencies, not just top-level (so the lock file or equiv) or you just reward the "barely wrap it and give it a new name" js crowd even more.
free market. go and charge.
How much was left-pad worth? Lots of people used it because it's free, not because it's valuable.
the payment isn't the problem so much as the payment processing. They wouldn't support crypto, even if they did, getting crypto without KYC hassle is a PITA, not worth it for paying one company $1. Not associating your real identity with a github repo is very important to most github users.
Payment could solve lots of problems, but there is no real and meaningful cash-equivalent payment system or method. This isn't a tech problem either, governments allow cash payments, but if it is digital, they won't allow any means that preserves privacy. Money laundering is their concern. You can't solve this without laws changing. Even if I don't mind buying crypto with a credit card, I still have to go through proving my identity with my id card, as if my credit-card company didn't do that already.
payment is a huge barrier to commerce these days, people think LLMs will change the world, but payment tech/laws will have a bigger effect in my opinion.
Let's say HN mods go a little crazy one day and want to let us tip each other for good posts and comments, imagine if all they had to do is add an html tag in the right place and that's it. All we had to do is click a button and it just works, and there is no exposure of private information by any involved party, and you could fund that payment by buying something (a card?) at a convenience store in person, just as easily as you could with a crypto payment, moneygram or wire transfer.
I __want__ to pay so many news sites, blogs,etc... I don't mind tipping a few bucks to some guy who wrote a good blog, or who put together a decent project on github that saved me lots of time and work.
It isn't merely the change in economics or people getting a buck here and there, but the explosion in economic activity you have to look at. The generation of wealth, not the mere zero-sum transferring of currency. This is the type of stuff that changes society drastically, like freeways being invented, women being able to ride bicycles, airplanes allowing fast transport, telegrams allowing instant messaging,etc..
Everyone being able to easily pay anyone at all, including funding private as well as commercial projects would be more disruptive than democracy itself, if I could dare make that claim. There is freedom of movement, there is freedom of communication and last there is freedom of trade. these are the ultimate barriers to human progress. Imagine if everyone from texas to beijing could fund research and projects, trade stocks in companies (all companies in the world). You won't need governments to fund climate change work, I think eventually taxation itself will have to suffer, because people would be able to direct exactly where their funds went. Not just what department in the government gets a budget, but exactly what projects they spend it on. being able to not just talk or meet each other instantly (and even those have a long way to go) but to also collectively or as individuals found each other, governments and companies, that'd be the biggest thing that could happen this century.
This could be done, but again, we don't need better tech as much as we need a change in attitude. For people to actually believe this would result in a better world for them.
$5 a month per dependency, OK let's go! Hold up I've just reorganized my packages into sqlalchemy-base, sqlalchemy-core-sql, sqlalchemy-orm, sqlalchemy-oh-you-want-deletes-also, sqlalchemy-fewer-bugs, and about eight more
the problem with any approach like this based on usage metrics is that it will be abused to death
let everything be gratis and if you need something fixed, and engineer you hired to work for you in your org can fork or send in a patch. there, I solved it
Or the copyright holders can start dual licensing their software for commercial use
license A is GPL or MIT for academic and free applications
License B is for commercial use, with a fee
The license is literally whatever you want to put into it.
IMO the issue is with the open source community gatekeeping these policies. Shaming developers for proposing commercial licensing, then shaming corporations for properly using the IP according to the free license (e.g. MIT)
You mean Microsoft?
no.
This is suggesting Microsoft should take more power to itself, and disguise it as "community support"
Taxes, that's called taxes.
...With absolutely nothing expected in return. This is for work completed, not for leverage on future work
<humour> sounds like socialism amirite?</humour>
In principle it sounds like a grand idea, although there are a bunch of corner cases like how it works cross country borders, and de-anonymising maintainers.
If it was opt in for opensource projects, and there are strong guards against people forking/hard takover-ing then yes, it seems like a good idea in principle.
I will leave the AI enthusiasts to chime in about the future, and how we don't need OS anymore.
I disagree, due to github copilot and other AI crap Microsoft is adding to GitHub, they should pay us 5 USD per month.
> it is not okay to consider that this labor fell from the sky and is a gift, and that the people/person behind are just doing it for their own enjoyments.
Is that not what most of open source is? Things people make for themselves because they either found it fun or solved their own problem, then published it for others to use for free. Most projects are not worth the bureaucratic tax related headaches the income from them would bring (maybe that's just my EU showing).
What's not okay is demanding new features or to fix something urgently. That's paid territory.
Honestly this post is such a shit take it's borderline intentional ragebait.
love this idea on so many levels. Of course, then the fight moves to how allocation happens, and how to avoid people further gaming things like repo stars, forks, PRs, voting, dependencies, etc.
in particular, there's repos with extremely high activity where funding doesn't help anyone and repos with low activity where funding ensures continuity for key components we all depend on but which are under-funded for various reasons.
obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2347/
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You do not want to add profit incentives like this to FOSS.
Profit incentives like the one suggested is what brought us enshitification.
And the code is a free gift, unless the licence says otherwise. What's wrong with letting developers choose what to bill for?
The sense of entitlement is strong in these comments. If you haven’t built or maintained OSS I’m wondering why your opinion matters [edit: that's harshly worded I could have been more nuanced, hopefully the point is taken and it is a question]. There’s also the take that “this is fine” vs considering that the state of OSS things could be a LOT better with higher quality and more choices if we fed the beast properly.
That would be fun. Could over time round roughly to charging everyone to fund the use of GitHub Copilot to work on open source.