Comment by halukakin
2 years ago
I think there should be some serious changes about this. Github already knows which software packages a company uses. They could facilitate this. For example if the OSS maintainer asks for it, any company more than say three members should pay a monthly fee per package. Even 1 USD per package per month would make a huge difference for OSS. So if your javascript package.json has 20 dependencies, and you are actively developing, every month you should expect to pay 20USDfor that package.json.
I know the math above can be challenged from multiple aspects. But we need to start from somewhere.
Then suddenly a company paying more will feel like their demands are worth more than random Joey’s demands, and soon the backlog of the project is the company’s backlog and the maintainer will be treated as an employee with nonsensical deadlines and fixed long hours.
> 1 USD per package per month would make a huge difference for OSS. So if your javascript package.json has 20 dependencies, and you are actively developing, every month you should expect to pay 20USD
The proliferation of tiny NPM packages is bad enough already. It will only be made worse by the cobra effect.
Once you make a system like that distributing money, it becomes a game and people start exploiting it, and it all turns to crap.