GroundPlane

You are indeed a good motivator! The reason I did not want to make this post at first is that I need everything: people to brainstorm with, people that can carry the project, people with the skills to create a prototype, people who can convince FOSS projects to get on board, and people willing to encourage others to donate.

Overall too much labor, skills and connection for one person. I believe we would need a team of 10-15 volunteers, some already involved in projects, to put something up

Among distribution rules to be discussed, one of the first points would be who is eligible. I would not want corporations to be supported by these donations, but some companies actually focus on FOSS as a service and I could see them getting in on it. I would exclude devs employed at a company getting paid to contribute as well.

I think this would not drastically change the status quo. Today, corporations contribute to FOSS, but mostly to make sure their hardware or other software is well supported. They will still have that incentive if there is a central donation system that excludes them.

That's sort of what is preached here. However, no one is gonna bother making a complete list of projects and dependencies. And we still have to define what is the even distribution among Lemmy and its dependencies for example, hence the need for a democratic structure

Thank you for the input. I guess it would be hard to track community engagement. Also, whatever is done with the donation is up to the project maintainers, in any case. Accepting the pull request in your case is also a great deal of work given the amount of spam they can create, so it is still fair in some way. No one will get rich off of donations anyway

I did, and I was intentionally hopeful when I wrote that. I stand by the latter part of the argument though. I've seen enough situations where splitting money was not a problem as long as a common interest was there and the decision process was flear and fair

The effort behind that list is great and it does help people out. But I don't think many people will look at it and decide to donate. This is part of what is to be solved here

Oh yes there will be drama. But I would gladly help sort it out if there was enough interest and I think I wouldn't be alone in that endeavour.

It's always better to distribute poorly than not distribute at all

Stupidly simple doesn't seem to be able to fix the problem here. We need to find the simplest way that can help. How would you make it simpler?

FSF stepping up would be awesome and I've thought about it. Sadly it doesn't seem to be in their priorities

You mean make a post on Lemmy? For me the root problem is still here: I have no contacts in the (admittedly extremely wide) industry and could not build a platform for people to register their projects to. I can only draw the outline of how this thing would work

Edit: I'll try to write something down and make a post somewhere. Any community suggestions?

In this case, there are many stakeholders involved. Volunteers, developers on corporate payroll, etc. That alone adds complexity to any solution. Doesn't men no solution can be found, but adds to the inertia since it requires more effort

For all I care the FSF could handle this actually