Two things are true.
Many open source contributors have been laid off recently, and have not been able to find new roles. Many of these have become the fabled “person in Nebraska”, made famous by XKCD #2347. Every RubyGem, NPM, pip, cargo, etc, package you have ever used is worth at least $1 to you and the careers and products they helped build. Many people would contribute more financially to open source if more systems were in place to facilitate that.
All modern digital infrastructure (depending on) a project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003 - xkcd.com/2347
You may be saying:
Systems do exist to enable donations or subscriptions to developers. In fact I’m reading this on one such system!
Yes, …
Two things are true.
Many open source contributors have been laid off recently, and have not been able to find new roles. Many of these have become the fabled “person in Nebraska”, made famous by XKCD #2347. Every RubyGem, NPM, pip, cargo, etc, package you have ever used is worth at least $1 to you and the careers and products they helped build. Many people would contribute more financially to open source if more systems were in place to facilitate that.
All modern digital infrastructure (depending on) a project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003 - xkcd.com/2347
You may be saying:
Systems do exist to enable donations or subscriptions to developers. In fact I’m reading this on one such system!
Yes, fine, three things are true. Those systems are excellent, and underutilized. Why?
Finding the funding path for a project is hard. Unless you are the meticulous type to memorize a Gemfile.lock, yarn.lock, or package-lock.json, many, if not most, of the projects at the bottom of the tree get overlooked. Since they know they will be overlooked, they often don’t even bother setting up paths for donations.
What kinds of dependencies?
The nested, indirect, dependencies loaded by your direct dependencies. The development and test dependencies which you rely on for AI to validate its work when you are vibe coding The ones that take just as much effort to build, but fail to get recognized as valuable.
Aren’t there tools that automatically dig into the dependency tree to help fund those indirect dependencies?
Yes, those are great, and I encourage people to use them. So apparently four things are true, but:
None dig down more than 3 levels into a dependency tree, and trees can be much deeper than that
In Ruby, for example, bundle fund doesn’t consider indirect dependencies
In some contexts they only consider runtime dependencies
In Ruby, for example, bundle fund doesn’t consider development dependencies in Gemfile during RubyGem development
I love bundle fund, but if the command isn’t run, they don’t see the requests for help with funding, and it is never run automatically.
Currently, funding for the majority of free (libre) open source code (FLOSS) is hard.
What if it was easy?
What if a project could tell you how to support it precisely when you are using it, and deriving value from it?
New #Ruby gem to fund open source developers whose projects get missed by other #FLOSS #funding tools which don’t cover dev deps, nor indirect deps > 3 levels down.
👉 no tracking 👉 no network calls 👉 never forces or requires payment 👉 supports buy-once, or per-version 👉 easily silenced nags 👉 sets of related libraries share activation keys 👉 nags are opt-in for maintainers, opt-out for users 👉 nags are throttled to customizable frequency 👉 inert in non-TTY shells (i.e. production-like environments) 👉 inert when exit status is non-zero 👉 inert for many edge cases, such as an internal failure 👉 inert when a global silencing ENV variable is set (you’re welcome, haters!)
Open source projects in which languages will have this ability? Ruby Javascript Elixir Python Perl ... Join the discord if you have more ideas, and want to contribute. A lanugage just needs to have an “atexit()” style hook, i.e. a process termination hook. A bunch of languages meet the criteria, even Bash.
Cover photo by me, CC-SA 4.0.