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inputmice | 5 years ago

Two issues here:

Models like these existed. Flattr and Liberapay. The latter had to switch away from the pooling model because turns out when you do the pooling you essentially become a bank and that’s difficult to do legally.

Those models only work if users actually visit your website or your Github. I’m developing an app targeted at end users and I bet 90% of them have never been on Github or even know what that is.

discuss

black_puppydog|5 years ago

I totally take your second point. But for the niche of apps that is developed for tech folks (think sth like ripgrep) this seems pretty viable.

For user-facing apps, it should always be the platform(s) distributing it that should have a pool mechanism. So google for android apps, Apple for iOS. Yeah, I know, that'll be a cold day in hell...

PC software is a tough one there since there's no one app store. Which is the PC platform's strength, but yeah, that makes a pool difficult. As you said, Liberapay tried something like this. Would be cool if something like this could become big enough to justify the legal legwork necessary for this.

sbuttgereit|5 years ago

I think an even larger issue is that, I might know what OSS projects I make use of and will elect to support. But I might not have visibility into the OSS projects that _those_ projects themselves rely upon and really should be getting a cut.

So as I see it the proposed solution does remove friction to supporting a large number of projects, but doesn't solve the visibility issue very well as I expect most projects to be in that "used by something I use" category.

OJFord|5 years ago

But if you're targetting end users who haven't been to GitHub... aren't you just billing them for access to your app? Seems like a different problem to getting paid for OSS by people who do know how to find and use it for free.