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)
I would love an APP like this, actually thought about needing something like this a few months back.
I would use it, but I see the problems mentioned by others with giving hugely wrong incentives to devs, if the app gains traction (running in background, making slower software, hiding dependencies, etc.)
Also I dont really know if use time really is the best metric (dont know anything better though.)
Also also there would need to be a smart way to detect dependencies, forks and the like, as the frontend is often not the part which is the most work to maintain
Perhaps amount of time the app is the focused window AND the mouse is in it or keystrokes are actively being entered to it?
Yeaaaaah, this would need WM integration which woukd be a pain to write
Yeah, maybe an Option for developers to selfregister their dependencies/forks? Like a community driven gentlemans agreement
Like if the freetube developers gives an honest review on what other work they build on, and the percentage of money that should go to them vs the projects they build on, the yt-dlp (which is hypothetically used in freetube) author can accept the offered split % (in which case the split is done automatically without user interaction) or ask for an alternative split %, in which case the user needs to choose which percentage of their donations goes to whom.
I know handeling user data and accounts is probably out of the scope of this project, but wanted to put this out there anyway