this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2024
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This is one of the major universal gaps in FOSS. I have a yearly reminder set to donate, and a list of projects within it — I do it this way because a) every project I've encountered only offer MONTHLY recurring, which is stupid as fuck because b) no I'm not fucking donating the $5 a month minimum to dozens of projects and c) larger donations usually have lower fees (e.g. donating $60 usually has lower fees than 12 x $5); why the fuck would I give the banks 30% more of my donation than necessary?
Users shouldn't have to manually deal with this shit, and valuable projects shouldn't have to beg for pennies. There should be a FOSS payment management project that enables users to create an account, add ALL of the FOSS projects they use (or want to donate to), set a monthly / yearly contribution, and be done with it. Users can choose to allocate percentages or let the software divide the money between all of them evenly, including all of their FOSS dependencies.
Well, sure but at some point that donated money has to get distributed out to the accounts of the individual developers, and then you still have the transaction fee problem.
It might seem like the obvious solution is to collect donation amounts for a developer until some minimum value is reached and then distribute it, but then the donation platform is holding money (in trust? in escrow? not sure) basically making them a bank, which makes the whole thing a lot more complicated in terms of financial regulation (not impossible, but probably too expensive to operate to be worthwhile).
I think this part might be a practical impossibility. All of the larger/more popular open source projects are basically this:
That XKCD reminds me of the case a year or three ago where some solo dev that no-one had ever heard of was maintaining a library that a couple of other very popular and major libraries depended on. Something somewhere broke for some reason, and normally this guy would've been all over it before most people even realized there had been a problem, but he was in hospital or jail or something, so dozens of huge projects that indirectly relied on his library came crashing down.
What upset me most was reading the community discussion. I didn't see a single person saying, "How can we make sure that some money gets to this guy and not just the more visible libraries that rely so heavily on his work?", even though the issue was obliquely raised in several places, but I did see quite a few saying, "How can we wrest this code out of this guy's hands against his will and make multiple other people maintain it (but not me, I'm too busy) so we don't have a single point of failure?"
Well obviously giving financial support is important, but having more than 1 maintainer is good too. Because any amount of money wouldn't have stopped him from going to the hospital / jail, and certainly wouldn't help if he got hit by a bus.
Correction! It's practically impossible to implement with conventional fiat banking. It would be functionally plausible to implement if the donations were in cryptocurrencies, with a built in audit trail, and smart contracts handling the escrow and distribution — though FOSS funding would be exposed to all the downsides of cryptocurrencies (high volatility, low liquidity, regulatory fuckery, etc).
If you don't want to pay banks, ask the devs for a crypto address perhaps