I had this idea recently: if people are willing to pay a small fee monthly for streaming services or Photoshop, surely some would also be willing to pay a similar amount for the FOSS they use. Even a few cents monthly would add up to quite a substantial sum over a vast userbase*. In light of this, I've started working on an app that records your app usage, and then at the end of the month splits whatever sum of money you want to donate amongst the apps in proportion to the time you spent using them.
Then it will (hopefully) let you donate to all of those projects with a single click.
Since it's only halfway finished, I'm posting this to gague how much interest there would be in such an app. Could you could see yourself using something like this? Do you have any ideas for what I should add/change?
*(It also occurred to me that perhaps one way to fix surveillance capitalism on the internet would be if every HTTP get request came with a microtransaction (eg 0.01¢) attached; those without money would gain those 0.01¢ by seeing ads, like today)
Yes this is something I've already run up against. I've written a pretty functional scraper for donation pages. There seem to be ~6 donation platforms with the biggest one (PayPal eeugh) having 30% adoption. And yes not many have an API for one-to-many payments, although LiberaPay which comes a close second does. Hopefully if enough people use this app it'll be lucrative enough for more projects to open LiberaPay accounts.
Yup. I wish there was an API for this. My plan right now is to scrape the debian repos as packages contain dependency information.