Is there a world in which we pay for what we now use for free?
I would love to see a world where developers can build what they love and make a living doing it. Recent innovations like Github sponsors, and Patreon have allowed some prominent open source contributors the ability to work full time on their open source projects which I think is really cool.
If you take any project's dependency tree it's filled with a pyramid of hundreds of modules. I could image a payment structure that somehow divided down fees for each package perhaps based on a set of criteria perhaps module size, version count, commit count, where the price would be fractions of a cent over a period of time.
Imagine using a module and paying $0.15 per month. For a small module that gets 4,018 downloads a month thats around $600 for that one module.
I think we've taken for granted this era of technology where companies valued in the millions are built using hours of free labor.
As someone who loves creating open source projects, it would be nice if as a developer I could lead a different self-guided way of making money that didn't revolve around working for a large tech company.
Top comments (3)
I don't think this will work. Open-source projects don't make money from selling the functionality but from premium support and donations. If a project is truly useful, it will get donations from companies that use it. Many companies donate thousands of dollars per year per project. That is how big open-source projects survive. Also, many open-source projects are actually maintained by big companies that just want to make the code freely available.
Now, why won't your idea work? Let's assume that you have ProjectX open-source. But it depends on three other projects and those can also depend on others. Where do you draw the line for paying? Do you pay only to the top-most project? Do you drip-down payments to the rest? If you only pay 0.15$, there may be even less than 1 cent per project. Do you pay 15 cents per project/ the total cost can reach 10 or maybe even 20$ (or a lot more on certain frameworks). Totally not sustainable.
Also, under what circumstances will you ask for money? Will I need to pay just for commercial projects or for home projects as well? Also, at what point will an experiment turn in a commercial one? Furthermore, how will you enforce payment?
Open-source projects should remain as they are. There are projects that do offer something similar to what you described. A game engine comes in mind now. The code is freely available and you are free to use it, but once you get more than a certain amount in sales, you pay a percentage (4% I think) of the revenue.
Wow, thank you Pazvanti for your wise and well worded response. I've been considering the current crypto-craze and thinking about digital commodities and the world of Non-fungible tokens (NFT's). For some reason my mind is trying to create value / worth in all things that we currently deem as free. I value your insight and I do I think you're right, this will never happen as I described, it's to cumbersome.
There are ways to monetize open-source projects. People that work on them need to get paid as well and it is a big industry. There are many licenses available or maybe even partial-openness.
The big problem, for any project/product, is not getting the money, is making something useful enough that people or companies want to pay.