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Alexander Girke
Alexander Girke

Posted on • Updated on

OSS Sponsoring by Usage? 💰📈

Hi there,

I recently thought about all the different OSS libraries I use every day at work and in personal projects.

Most of them are created and maintained by individuals that spend a lot of their time on that work. So, to give something back seems like a good thing to do - but to whom?

What I was asking myself is if there is already a tool/method to track the actual usage of a certain library or all dependencies of a project in general - and then use that data to aggregate & distribute donations to those people using the well-known platforms like GitHub Sponsors, Buy Me A Coffee, Open Collective, and all the others...

If there is no such thing, do you think people might be interested in something like that?
If so, what could the actual measure for a donation look like? Fixed rate per build / install task? Times the occurrence of that library in the dependency tree? Or a more sophisticated mechanism?

Please comment below, if you have any other ideas or anything to add 😊

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