It does seem problematic. I could see it being a larger issue later, so it could be good to find a better solution.
Some possible alternatives
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Remove the ability to move it up/down.
- The consequences of this seem worse to me. Set permanent numbers might have been good at first, but there's potential for them to become worse
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Distribution to different set groups.
A simple example would be a distribution on repositories sorted by stars.
- The lowest 25% receives nothing, there's a cut off to reduce abuse.
- 25 - 50% receives 33%,
- 50 - 75% receives 33%
- 75 - 100% receives 33%
This is just an bad example, but seems more careful in distribution than 1000 stars that can be increased by other licenses. It's definitely more complex to understand, but tools could simplify it
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Something else?
- It doesn't seem possible to move star counts down easily
- It doesn't seem possible to change the amounts later with the license. I don't think a company is going to be too willing to choose a license that seems to imply funding groups are available then leaves the potential for them to drastically change later
- I mean, I guess it could always be more complex
- ex. 5% royalty to a non profit where any person who has had their identity verified can vote in elections yearly to...
I'm open to suggestions for how it could better.
I don't disagree. I don't really know how to fix the problem in what has been considered without an extra organization that does some form of identity verification and then collects votes on open source from anywhere on the internet.
The only reason GitHub was selected was because it's easily recognized and the metric is understood
Anything that depends on it would be including it in something else later. I was considering anything that used it that made income had to pay 5% royalty. A library that uses a library that uses a library with it would had to pay 5% on income made with the final library. Though, I don't necessarily have an opinion on requirements of the license of the final library. I also wasn't considering open source restrictions like the GPL.