Oh, I know! Let’s redistribute royalty payments from AI subscriptions in Spotify-fashion from OpenAI and friends to developers, kind of like how Spotify pays artists for streams we get a cut of the token. Oh wait… no one’s profitable yet. Right.
GitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month to fund open source
171–180 of 352 posts
Re: GitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month to fund open source
#172> it is not okay to consider that this labor fell from the sky and is a gift, and that the people/person behind are just doing it for their own enjoyments. I am. I enjoy making things, and it's even better when others enjoy them. Just because you have expectations that you should be compensated for everything line of code you write; doesn't make it ubiquitous, nor should your expectations be considered the default. I…
Agreed. I do this too.
Re: GitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month to fund open source
#173Yeah ask Microsoft to charge everyone $1/m more, what could go wrong. They didn't coin the phrase "embrace, extend, extinguish" or anything
Even better.
Have Microsoft charge people $ for their repos, and then take their code to train their LLM for more $.
And they can use the surplus $ to fund open source projects to produce more code to train their LLM for even more $, and reduce their taxes thanks to the charitable donations.
Everyone wins, right?
Thankfully we still have Codeberg.
Re: GitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month to fund open source
#174GitHub already charges organisations to fund open source features. Otherwise it wouldn't lack so many enterprise level features, it wouldn't have half baked solution that do not take into consideration enterprise requirements. GH Actions for example is still not there yet after years
Re: GitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month to fund open source
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's also the problem of who decides who gets paid? If they pay by popularity most of my $1 would go to javascript. I'd rather it went to libraries I actually use.
Even though I like JS/TS, I agree... not to mention that at even 10x the suggested amount for paid accounts, or even $1 per private repo per month, it still wouldn't be significant to any individual developer... More along the lines of thanks for the cup of coffee money as opposed to income money. As suggested, I do think there should be room for grant funding, especially in the case of govts switching to open-source…
Not sure if github publishes their subscriber numbers but there may be quite a few, at least corporate?
Personally I used to pay 7/month for personal use, then when MS bought it it went down to 4, and one day when my card expired I noticed I'm not using any of the paid features and private repos are now free... so now I'm paying 0.
Re: GitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month to fund open source
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
People who are specifically not employed because they aren't motivated to do anything at all don't seem to be the best sample for what average people could do if they had more free time during their waking hours.
It seems unlikely that the most motivated people will take up UBI; the most likely UBI recipients are those who are marginally employed, and likely marginally motivated.
Guess what the U stands for
Re: GitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month to fund open source
#177While delegating fund collection and disbursement to one organization reduces overhead for each project, the centralized nature of the setup can be asking for trouble.
Instead, why not accept the reality that 1) projects may charge for their offerings and 2) users may have to pay for such offerings? As a user, if a project's offering is useful to me, then I should be willing to pay for it. As a creator, if I want to get paid for my offering, then I should be willing to ask for it. An upside of such a change could be that we start being more focused and prudent about what we use and create.
Without such delegation, projects will have to do the heavy lifting in terms of collection of funds; features such as sponsorship in GH or setting up e-payments via Stripe or Paypay may help reduce this brunt.
Re: GitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month to fund open source
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
People who are specifically not employed because they aren't motivated to do anything at all don't seem to be the best sample for what average people could do if they had more free time during their waking hours.
It seems unlikely that the most motivated people will take up UBI; the most likely UBI recipients are those who are marginally employed, and likely marginally motivated.
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Re: GitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month to fund open source
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
The hikikomori [1] or NEETs ought to be a hotbed of creative works if your hypothesis is true. And they aren't, plain and simple. There is effectively zero evidence suggesting a population on UBI will result in some sort of outpouring of creativity. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori and it's not a phenomenon limited to Japan.
The UK music culture of the 1960s was in large part due to the "dole" or cash payments to poor people.
I don't think that's the only reason since the dole exists today too and there's not as much good music coming out.
Jazz and other music genres in the US came without government welfare, they came from struggle and oppression. Motivated artists will still work part time to fund their dream, they don't necessarily wait for welfare to start making art.
IF you were to give a lot of people free money today, will you get more and higher quality art in return, or will most people just drink and smoke that money while playing videogames at home?
Society, people and the world today are vastly different than back in the 1960s, so we need new polices targeting the society of today, not 1960s policies.
Re: GitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month to fund open source
#180No. Take some of that enterprise cash and lay it aside on a daily lottery which devs automatically enter based on usage metrics. And a bit more enterprise aside to give directly to the customers' deep dependency maintainers (which gh already knows).