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Feb 17, 2023Liked by FOSS Post

This is a bit of a tough problem for me as an individual. I use Linux, and I have done so for a long time. I'm an advocate of Linux and free software generally. I contribute monthly to the (open source) Ardour project, and occasionally to Linux Mint (my favorite distro + cinnamon). And every once in a while I make a one-off contribution to something or another.

That said, my computer currently has 4916 installed packages. If I were to contribute just $1/month for each of those packages, that would be $4916/month. That wouldn't be sustainable for me as a user. And you must admit, some of those packages are well worth considerably more than $1.

Every one of those packages is valuable or serves a useful purpose, otherwise it wouldn't be installed. So every one of them is worthy of support. And I feel badly for not directly providing the contributors what their efforts are worth.

But at the same time -- who can afford to pay nearly $60k/year for the OS and packages, which is (at least) what it is worth?

If there were a way for me to make a (voluntary) $100 contribution annually, and have that fairly allocated to the maintainers of the software I use (without the party doing the allocation gobbling up half of it) -- I would happily and gladly do it, and maybe even contribute more. But there is no way to do this, and its not practical for me to do individually.

But you see the problem with, for example, the Linux Foundation. I have no idea what sets their priorities, but they aren't set in such a way that me contributing to them makes sense.

So that's the problem.

Any ideas how to fix it?

I am imagining a utility sort of like top that measures how much use I am getting from software over the course of the year. At the end of the year, I send that result to X entity with a check for $100 and they divvy it up. If me and 100k of my closest friends do this, a lot of software that escapes notice of big foundations will be funded.

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