Comment by cxr

> I keep reading from project leaders like ESLint’s things like “if only they paid $1 each…” as if that made any economic sense at all. If they paid $1 each, you would not [have] thousands let alone millions of users.

The dirty secret of the GitHub era of open source is that many developers and open source codebases would be better off if such a thing happened.

A lot of stuff associated with the development processes that are fashionable with GitHub and programmer Twitter provide net negative value (e.g. issue close bots) or neutral value at best (because they solve a problem that really exists but not at the scale that most downstream projects that opt in are actually at). If it suddenly became necessary or even just strongly encouraged for programmers to pay a dollar a month for things that are only as pervasive as they are because they are free and give the false sense of productivity, then we'd see a huge dropoff in the adoption and use of lots of things that are of dubious value to begin with.