Front End Masters $50k Experiment Supporting the Entire Dependency Tree

I think what the people at thanks.dev and Front End Masters are doing is great, and I appreciate what they are doing. I made it on this list and got $5 for something. Great.

I've spoken with armini about Thanks.dev numerous times—a great person to talk with and knowledgeable about open-source economics.

The brass tax here is that the peak of open-source software written by humans has already passed us. The following steps we'll be seeing are things like LLMs, which are trained on the entire NPM registry and can solve any known domain problem through curated APIs.

The next few years of open-source will be unglorified janitorial positions with minimal pay. Most of the intelligent maintainers have already offloaded their projects to others.

Anecdotally, I have found that open-source projects with overly abundant funding have perverse incentives for their user base and ultimately harm society.

The thanks.dev approach is great IMO. Tracing your project's entire dependency tree recursively and distributing money evenly to all projects is a great way to ensure that smaller/less visible projects also get some recognition.

These projects may be small, or you may not think about them because they are 1, 2 or more dependencies away, but they are still part of the success of the project/company/product.

(Note that I'm slightly biased here, as my project (Moto) has received funding from thanks.dev in the past (thanks to Sentry)).

I’d love to hear your feedback on this approach to funding open source.