A new funding model for open source software

I think that is the only way to get open source revenue! Unfortunately that means you either need a service or some closed source part that guarantees that revenue.

I disagree. What this need is a popular, well known and trustable organisation with enough money to invest into this. Github could be this organisation, but other could do that to, like Mozilla for example, or the FSF, Patreon, Facebook, Apple, maybe even google if they can sell a vision of them not shutting it down 6 monts later.

What is needed is awarness of such an option. Which would work better of course when integrated into the platform. But patreon seems to have proofen that it's also possible to do this with external services.

Also a trustable institution to handle the money

And finally a decent interface to manage your sponsorings, which also means someone doing the work in the background to figure out whether a project accepts donations and how. Would be easy if the platform supports it somewhat automatically, but could also be done manually for projects on other platforms.

I would even go a step further and not limit this to open source projects, but the whole web. Add a simple button into the browser to allow sponsoring for the actual visited url. With some background-service which is smart enough to figure out whether the visited url is a project on github/gitlab/sourceforge, or a blog, a podcast, some content-company , a streamer, or some dude on twitter with something you wanna support.

And if nothing can found to support, an issue is created and the humans in the background will figure out how to support what you consider as supportable, and will inform you if something was found. And with time some schemas and APIs will grow so platforms will allow automation fof this.

There's plenty of crucial work that does not lead to any github star:

- Linux distribution work, including packaging, reliability, security

- Security research: finding vulnerabilities and notifying the authors

- Configuration, tuning, benchmarking, finding bugs...

I think the term you're looking for is "public goods", which combines non-rivalrous and the author chooses not to exclude people through legal means.

Running out of time to comment before I need to get to work so I'll just link our economics page here: https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/about/economics

Do I believe that artistic creators are a net-win to society? 100% Do I wish that artistic professions were seen as worthy of support? Yes I do. But in actual today reality, most artists can announce that they are doing a show, staging a production, what have you, and make some money.

I would argue that the only way for someone to approximate this in 2020 as a developer of creative but not economy-driving things is for Github to adopt a pool as described by the OP.

One thing I want to be really clear about is that people shouldn't support projects with lots of stars just because they have lots of stars. Stars are a passible metric for evaluating which tool to choose, perhaps. But I think the power of the pool concept is that Github could hit you up when you git clone, or maybe even occasionally ping you with a "hey, are you finding this useful? consider adding it to your pool". Or how about opt-in reminders like "hey, you're about to add your 80th project to the pool, but at $80 pledged that would put your contribution below $1 for each project. no shade intended, but how cool would it be if you kept your pool >$2/project? it'll be the best value for $160 this month."