There are two economic factors that come into play here:
1. Open source software is price anchored at $0. I know that there are commercial alternatives that might anchor open source software: say Photoshop for Gimp. But the direct pricing is "Here, it's free."
2. I run Ubuntu. A measly $5.00 per piece of open source adds up to many thousands of dollars. That's not going to happen, even if it was practical. Someone is surely getting stiffed. If I think about libraries like padleft too, then it's pretty much everyone...or to a first approximation, everyone.
Should I send a check to Google for Chromium and throw a quarter toward Facebook every time I visit a website that uses React.js? What about a utility that's compiled with GCC, do I write one check to the author and another to FSF?
That's sort of how digital music streaming works...for consumers mostly and not so much for creators. I mean even if I put $100/month into something like Flattr, across the thousands of open source authors whose work I use, each would get about a penny.
If someone were to go ahead and build the proposed sponsorship platform, it ought to have some method to identify dependencies - either through developers manually specifying them, or through automated analysis of package manager dependencies etc etc - and somehow automatically allocate some percentage of donations accordingly. No, such a system wouldn't be perfect, but it would be better than nothing.
It would certainly be easy to implement "take $X (or X%) out of the money I receive and give them to foo instead". Of course, that would only work if both projects were using the same platform.
1. Open source software is price anchored at $0. I know that there are commercial alternatives that might anchor open source software: say Photoshop for Gimp. But the direct pricing is "Here, it's free."
2. I run Ubuntu. A measly $5.00 per piece of open source adds up to many thousands of dollars. That's not going to happen, even if it was practical. Someone is surely getting stiffed. If I think about libraries like padleft too, then it's pretty much everyone...or to a first approximation, everyone.
Should I send a check to Google for Chromium and throw a quarter toward Facebook every time I visit a website that uses React.js? What about a utility that's compiled with GCC, do I write one check to the author and another to FSF?
It's just not that simple.