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What about automatically "crowdfunding" open source projects? Idea: would it be possible to design a system where we distribute a membership fee to open source projects used?

Let's say NPM would cost $10 / month per end-user. This would be redistributed to all the packages you use. (Or, similarly, cumulative membership fees will be distributed according to # of projects that re-use your package).

Have there been experiments like this? Any thoughts?

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That idea needs a bit more baking IMO. It seems obvious to me that the immediate consequence of this would be that we'd be rewarding trivial but widely used packages like left-pad[0], and thereby incentivizing the creation of a hundred clones of every trivial feature.

0: https://www.npmjs.com/package/left-pad

I think that would have a negative effect on individuals and open source developers. Have a dependency on npm, 10$/m. Have a dependency on Nuget, 10$/m.. I'm at 20$/m for my project which may or may not be a commercial product.

With this model, the fees could increase with each distribution platform your project depends on.

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