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That sounds very confusing and requires invasive license auditing to enforce.

You can also do this by just paying into a commercial stack. The beauty of OSS is that it’s easy to use and reuse.

I’d rather just pay Microsoft than use a scheme where I pay by the number of dependencies.

Also, not that I release a ton of packages, but I do contribute some here and there. I would not contribute to commercial packages where my labor benefits some org.

And I would still release packages under a permissive license that allows for reuse without any compensation to me.

> I’d rather just pay Microsoft than use a scheme where I pay by the number of dependencies.

The beauty here is if Microsoft was using OSS they would need to pay still on their own bills of usage.

Microsoft actually has a pretty cool OSS funding campaign that bypasses a lot of the "ugh, but the paperwork to get this funded is insane" stuff and just lets engineers nominate and vote on projects: https://github.com/microsoft-sponsorships/microsoft-foss-fun...

I've voted several times and think it's a great model. It was pioneered by Indeed and is likely also adopted elsewhere.

I think it's better than nothing to be honest. The only thing is, it's voluntary, so in that sense it's always a bit like charity, and it's always towards a given project at large and not spread. But I have no horse in this race.

That contributions are voluntary can be a strength, not a weakness.

Just for sports.

> I’d rather just pay Microsoft than use a scheme where I pay by the number of dependencies.

So you wouldn't want to support OSS, you would rather support a company.

> I would not contribute to commercial packages where my labor benefits some org.

That would be your call for sure.

> And I would still release packages under a permissive license that allows for reuse without any compensation to me.

This would be your prerogative as well.

Let's pretend we have in place the infrastructure. A place where anyone can submit a bill of usage, and do payments, and this holds the payments and a person can register their software there. For your use case it would have even the possibility of you redirecting the funds you don't want into other projects. Perhaps a badge on your profile, "redirector", "open hands", wtv.

Let's imagine that every piece of software besides a "readme.md" file, has a file describing its dependencies. NPM would be able to do this like they can build a dependency graph. Your OS would be able to do this because each programs/lib would be able to do this/provide their own.

Let's say there's a piece of software that can pick all these little files and coalesce them into a single one.

Now you could build a "package" of what it would cost you, see what is in there and then just make it part of your monthly payroll.

There's no bureaucracy. If you are a company using software and not paying for it, you would be under breach of contract and could be sued legally.

This is so awful. Can you imagine how people would redesign tools to minmax their income?

Add my left pad library as a dependency pull request.

The damage this would do to OSS would be irreversible.

Exactly. I agree to split my components into 5 pieces and use 3 of yours as dependencies. In exchange, you agree to depend on at least 3 of mine.

Next year, we each achieve 33% YoY growth by splitting one of our deps into two pieces 'for increased modularity' or some other reason totally not financially motivated.

Given it was open source you could see that happening? You could just like, choose the dependencies you wanted to use. Like vote with your wallet or something.

If there's a non-trivial amount of money at stake, I can 100% see that happening. I'd bet a nearly unlimited amount of money that it would happen.

Find a way to get something into a popular Linux distro and you can micro-split the downstream dependencies over time.

“Every time I apt-get update && apt-get upgrade -y, my monthly bill goes up; I better stop doing that...”

Yeah definitively. But when I wrote that, I meant you as an individual consumer wouldn't need to worry about that. Or someone who writes libraries or packages. Only if you were running a for profit business. The remaining would have to be on trust of the community running the packages but I can definitively entertain the idea of it not working as expected.

I'm both an individual consumer and a professional working for a for-profit business in most computing circumstances at home. Same for my permanently working-from-home freelancer spouse.

My network gear and proxmox server and TrueNAS and Synology all run open-source software and all four of those support both personal and for-profit activities to different degrees.

The Plex container is clearly fully personal, but the Unifi controller and backups use cases are mixed, and the standalone Ubuntu container is fully for-profit, all running on a mixed Proxmox. Which ones get charged and which ones are free?

Yeah. I Agree with you.

Also been thinking about a similar concept for a while. For the negative effects some have mentioned, one could also argue the possibility of a positive effect to make things more open and result in better quality / funded / open projects.

As an idea an addition to this could be a community trust score where users also get to vote on a few aspects of a project, like ‘is it well maintained?’, ‘do you understand changes in version updates?’ etc. maybe bad examples, but a few simple metrics which can give a project a good or bad rep based on what the maintainers does as presented by the community - not just nit-picked twitter quotes. Yes, these will need to be crafted carefully so that maintainer cannot game them but the result could be projects getting paid well for doing things that builds trust and makes the project more accessible.

Of course I could just look at the PR history and issues etc before I use a new package, but I would trust community feedback more than my 30 min deep dive.

Today we only have very vague metrics like npm popularity or github stars, which is very hard to accurately judge what package to choose or not.

Well, given that you could decide the things you use, I would imagine things would move towards some sort of cleanup?

And open source maintainers would be open to refuse PR's like they're now?

> So you wouldn't want to support OSS, you would rather support a company.

If I’m paying for it, it’s not open source. I’d rather pay a single company with a “simple”license, than something that costs me more when someone uses a leftpad package than just writing their own. I don’t want to have to have cost decisions factor into my design at that level.

Having the legal support to plan out if I’m under breach or not is expensive.

One of the things I like about OSS is I can avoid that. Paying and still having that threat is the worse of both worlds.

Also, unpredictable prices are really hard in my org. Having my payroll vary month to month on what’s happening is really hard. Do I pay based on when I compile? When I run? What if I want to have 10 test environments, so I pay times 10. What if I need to archive and might never run it, but need to make sure I can run it, do I pay. Etc etc. There’s a million different permutations based on project needs that vary by people.

With OSS, I can clearly plan and address all these. With commercial licenses, I usually can since I get a perpetual license per seat or cpu or whatever.

This new scheme would be really complex and include a lot of latent risk, and require that I’m constantly open to audit by some org. And audits are expensive to receive and support. No thanks, I’ll just skip using it and use OSS versions.

> If I’m paying for it, it’s not open source.

Open source and free are two separate things.

There are many projects out there that require a license for commercial use of the software because it's an attempt to make the project more sustainable.

Don't be surprised if more and more projects go down this route. The current model of giving corporations big freebies to make lots of money off of, and then often getting no financial or developer support for that, isn't sustainable and there's a massive burnout problem because of that. Times are good now, but just wait until a few things in your core infrastructure don't get patched or worse, they get archived, because the maintainer is tired of spending evenings fixing your problems for free.

> Open source and free are two separate things.

When I use the term open source, I mean “OSI license” as that’s what I think is most important. That means free.

Projects are free to do whatever they want, and choosing a closed source license that’s not free is their prerogative. More power to them. I probably will never buy anything from them, but I harbor no ill will.

But when it comes to supporting OSS, I’ll do it as I’ve been for the past few decades; using and contributing to it.

Note this is different than “fixing your problems for free” and I’ve funded a shitload of consulting to fix my problems with OSS. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect a problem to be fixed for free. Just like it’s unreasonable to expect that I must pay certain developers to fix problems in open source.

I find it funny when people say things aren’t sustainable and there are 20-50 year old projects and communities that are clearly sustainable and on multiple generations of developers.

“Not sustainable for me to do it” is very different from “not sustainable.” It’s ok that not everyone who wants to make a living doing something can’t afford to do it, that’s not a problem we need to solve as a society.

It's open source except if you're profiting for it.

I don't know if my english is rudimentary or something. No, you would pay per month, it would be automated. We could throw it on the block chain, or have an AI calculate it.

If you never run it you never run it, if it's part of your business backup plan you pay it.

With OSS for sure, you just go 0$ monthly payments, most straightforward payment plan ever, can't argue with that.

> I usually can since I get a perpetual license per seat or cpu or whatever.

Well, subscriptions are the future.

> Well, subscriptions are the future.

I hope not. Subscriptions for software are a pain and something I try to avoid.

Me too :)

"Everyone else/companies pay $0.01 per dependency, per month."

Yup. Open ocean. Because that just creates incentive to make a looooong dependency list.

Also, don't you think the complexity of packages are very different and it is therefore not fair, to make them all equal?

Of course, but even $500 per month is more than $0.

> Yup. Open ocean. Because that just creates incentive to make a looooong dependency list.

Well, perhaps no? Since those things don't get into your list by themselves I would think that it would incentivise the opposite. If whatever lib you're using has 100 dependencies, one for left-pad, the other for right, one for switching underscores for hyphens, this would make someone come and say, I can make this with much less cruft.

But still, if the dependencies are repeated across dependencies they wouldn't increase. So if you use 2 packages that both use say "curl", for your "bundle" it would still be only 1 entry for curl.

If money is involved, fraudsters will get involved.

You want to argue with people that their long dependency list is totally unneccecary? That will become the norm, if this is the metric on how much income everyone would get. The higher the number of packages - the higher the pay.

Does not reflect reality, where one package can be a million times more complex, than simple 100 packages.

Companies optimize for cost. If a package scams you by having too many dependencies then you simply don't use it.

> Non-profit/individuals non-profit don't pay anything.

> Everyone else/companies pay $0.01 per dependency, per month.

I don't get that dichotomy? People can do what they want, no? So are you simply saying that individual would be far less likely to fund open source software, while companies and assimilated would?

Or you would just want it to be mandatory for companies?

If the latter, that would be completely incompatible with Open Source.

Yes, imagining what I was saying it would be mandatory if your company was making a profit while using software that agreed to this.

The difference would be if you're setting up a blog to share your permaculture posts, you wouldn't need to pay, or something like that.

If you as a software author didn't want you could always put that the cost to use your package was $0?

What if the company was losing money? What if the permaculture blog was monetized by AdSense or something else?

Yeah the word profit was badly used. We could imagine it would be a regular cost and just like you wouldn't be able to forfeit paying for printer paper because you're not turning a profit you wouldn't either in this case.

The AdSense and other forms of monetisation would be indeed trickier, as well as more complex usage patterns. Like if a business spins up a lot of machines, how would that go, perhaps charging for each machine the same would be too expensive. But charging just once would be unfair. Perhaps that could be somehow split/incorporated into what is charged to the end user, where it would just be a cost of running the service, the providers would do it on their end. Perhaps the licensing would be flexible, so you paid for some cloud provider they did the payment and as part of the invoice you would have this bill of usage as well. I would also imagine that no one would try to prosecute a guy using a blog, at the same time if they're doing adsense that blog/domain would be registered.

It's not like I've spent more than the time it took me to write that thinking about it. If it was to work I also doubt it would be something that would come out right at the first iteration(s). It was more like, "wouldn't it be great if we had some sort of automatic distribution of credit that would somehow flow directly back to the source" but at the same time keeping the spirit of open source. It could possibly also align further, in a symbiotic way, service providers and open source as better software would mean lower costs, better integration, more time for tooling, etc. Or it could work the opposite and give rise to a gamed ecosystem.

See my response to /u/temac below. I think the entire problem with your argument is that you're trying to decide what someone should do with their work.

If I decide to spend thousands of hours writing software (or building a boat for that matter) and give it away for someone to make a profit with, that should be entirely my decision. The entire discussion is so patronizing I'm having trouble believing that I'm reading this. People aren't stupid: don't assume you know what's good for them better than they do. We all have our various motivations whether or not they make sense to someone else on the outside.

> "wouldn't it be great if we had some sort of automatic distribution of credit that would somehow flow directly back to the source"

You mean like GPL2?

The only one being patronising is you? How would this, hypothetical vapourware distribution system, steal your, or anyone, choice of doing whatever you want with your code? I think that if you read this and that's your conclusion it would seem that the only one assuming something would be you? You can just scroll up and read my post again.

It seems you're the one saying that others shouldn't have the choice of doing that? What would it matter to you if someone decided to do that for their own packages. How would that be different from using GPL on their own volition?

There is not even a "what if" to apply; it would be fundamentally contrary to Open Source and Free Software (violates freedom 0)

And I've nothing against people who want to invent new models. Just: this can't apply to the whole current Open Source / Free Software corpus and ecosystem. And this new model will never be able to mix.

Payed license does not need to be created anyway. This already widely exist and this is just proprietary software. And among proprietary software, there are also licenses that are incompatible between each others. And proprietary licenses that don't require monetary paiement from individuals.

So does creating new proprietary licenses that would be obviously incompatible with Free Software licenses, and probably incompatible with most other proprietary licenses, would achieve anything interesting? I doubt it.

You've summed up the problem I have with OP's arguments.

OSS already has a number of available licenses of varying levels of freedom that lets the creator decide how their creation should be used.

This entire discussion reads like "you developers are idiots who don't realize you're being taken advantage of." Whenever someone starts their argument with the (implicit or explicit) assumption that they are smarter than everyone else, my experience tells me that there's a hidden agenda in there somewhere. In this case it seems to be as trite as "corporations bad, people good" which, not to put too fine a point on it, is bullshit.

Yeah, the illuminati agenda.

Easier to add OSS tax into the social security payments. The difficult part is collecting usage analytics so that funds get distributed "fairly".

UBI and universal healthcare would make this a complete non-issue, as well as benefiting the arts and humanities.

TBH I have absolutely no desire to pay taxes for yet another JavaScript framework. I'd be happy to set aside, say, 5% of my monthly salary to be divided between the applications and libraries I actually use. (I do something like this, but manually and pretty unfairly, because it's difficult to cover thousands of projects with any meaningful sum as I don't have billions in my banking account).

The OS of my choice has this:

https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/

although it would probably be easy to inflate these numbers if your income depended on it.

> Non-profit/individuals non-profit don't pay anything.

>Everyone else/companies pay $0.01 per dependency, per month.

This isn't going to be both scalable and sustainable. You will find that people will calculate the cost of this vs. the cost of being a non-profit. It also isn't going to work where a small dependency gets the same payout as a more complicated dependency.

So, if 0 is sustainable, this would also be?

You mean they would become a non-profit so they wouldn't have to shell 50 bucks a month?

The dependency values wouldn't need to be $0.01. Maybe if the theory about free markets is true, then it would somehow be guided by the invisible hand, and we would let linux charge the amount of $0.10 per month. With 1M commercial servers that would be 100k per month. Not faang salaries I know. Maybe left pad could be paid in bitcoin, so we could have like fractionality towards infinity.

Linux is one of the world's most popular open source projects and represents the collaborative efforts of tens of thousands of software engineers. $10,000 per month might pay for two full time engineers.

Thankfully, that's not what OC is proposing.

> $10,000 per month might pay for two full time engineers

A good kernel engineer is paid well above $60K a year.

Aye, hence the "might". They'd have to accept well below market rates.

...or the projects would have to accept not-so-good engineers. :(

Unfortunately, money brings in risks around project quality and integrity.

That was an example, with an explicit note about it. Geez. Nothing would prevent people or companies to further invest, donate or write love songs about it.

10.000 would still be 10.000 more than 0 right or is my math wrong?

A platitude can often be worse than nothing at all. You've "solved" the problem, and now we can all go back to ignoring it. I'm more interested in real, scalable, sustainable funding solutions, than in continuing to give FOSS devs whatever crumbs may fall off of the SV dinner table. I'm certainly not going to pat anyone on the back for it.

Sure, let's just move forward with the cake then.

It's interesting to look at other copyright collective approaches in other copyrightable works like music. Though I'm sure the exact models actually shouldn't be followed, it bears looking at, with ASCAP being an interesting example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Society_of_Composers%...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_collective

The last thing we need is to reward libraries by popularity and quantity rather than quality.

Just like in academia and industry, our work should be reviewed by peers with relevant and proven experience.

The fact that some thing of NPM installs, github stars and reddit upvotes as a measure of merit says a lot about the immaturity of the software industry.

This would be rewarded by usage?

That isn't ideal at all. That's gittip - people forced to publicly receive contributions whether they want them or not.

You are thinking of tip4commit. Gittip later became Gratipay and then closed (but the fork at Liberapay still exists). Gittip never collected contributions for people who didn't first sign up. Gittip/Gratipay did other reckless things, but that's a separate matter.

Well perhaps this vapourware platform would have an option for you to redirect whatever funds to somewhere else?

(while making it clear on your package page that you were doing so)