Comment by treve
1 year ago
One thing is a bit frustrating for me personally is that I have a few packages that get tons of downloads yet very little stars. This is because I solve a niche well. Im usually deep in the dependency tree, rarely as a direct dependency. I would definitely be ignored by this scheme.
I don’t know what the solution to that is. I think you’d still get a few votes. I think it’s unlikely for library authors to pass some of their donations down to the libraries they depend on.
Foundations should probably be doing some of this work. Maybe government as well. National Science Foundation did it for a bit, partly because of Al Gore, but that is also how we ended up with the current model of everything being free either until it isn’t, or until you become the produce (advertising, user tracking).