Programming

17432 readers

120 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

snowe@programming.dev

Ategon@programming.dev

MaungaHikoi@lemmy.nz

345

Paying people to work on open source is good actually (jacobian.org)

submitted 9 months ago by testeronious@lemmy.world to c/programming@programming.dev

39 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 7 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

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

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).

including all of their FOSS dependencies

I think this part might be a practical impossibility. All of the larger/more popular open source projects are basically this:

[–] Redkey@programming.dev 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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?"

[–] kurwa@lemmy.world 5 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world -1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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).