Having open indices charge money is the “easy” part, relatively speaking. The author is correct that most companies will grumble a bit and then fork over the nominal amount of money needed to preserve their existing assumptions.
I think the rest of this don’t really work in practice though: it’s actually incredibly hard to distribute money to open source maintainers across hundreds of jurisdictions, and it’s not immediately obvious how a service like PyPI (which is barely funded to maintain and sustain itself) would shoulder such a burden without diverting a very large fraction of that money for things that would make people upset (read: lawyers and tax professionals).
(NPM would appear to be the exception to this since it has - at least on paper - the legal resources of Microsoft behind it. But I think it’s largely a quirk of history that the JavaScript packaging ecosystem ended up with a single corporate owner, and no ecosystem I’ve worked with seems eager to pursue a similar relationship.)
I was thinking this too, and also thinking about who even gets paid. Like say I start an open source project and work on it for a few years, build a reputation and user base, and the registry is paying me.
I decide to step down, and nominate a trusted contributor as the new maintainer. Do I deserve to still get part of those payments? If so, what percentage do I get, and what does the new maintainer get?
I recently actually did take over maintenance for a Rust crate that was unmaintained and archived (but still widely used). The two (former) maintainers are still active, working on a related piece of software. Would I then deserve to get a cut of payments? Should the original maintainers still get something? Sure, I'm putting in lots of time and work now, but in total I've spent less than 1% of the time they have.
I guess you could adopt what I'd think of as the employment-based method. Whoever is actively maintaining gets payments, and that's it. That feels unsatisfying somehow, though. Ultimately every project would have to decide how to divide the payments, and that feels hard to do equitably in many cases. That's going to create resentment and hurt feelings.
Not saying that invalidates the idea, but it does make it harder on people in practice.
The active maintainer(s) get paid for doing ongoing work, the same as any other job. That creates incentive to be the maintainer of a project. If the maintainer(s) isn't/aren't active, then there should be incentive for someone else to take over. Same as any other job.
woodruffw · · focus · HN ↗
Having open indices charge money is the “easy” part, relatively speaking. The author is correct that most companies will grumble a bit and then fork over the nominal amount of money needed to preserve their existing assumptions.
I think the rest of this don’t really work in practice though: it’s actually incredibly hard to distribute money to open source maintainers across hundreds of jurisdictions, and it’s not immediately obvious how a service like PyPI (which is barely funded to maintain and sustain itself) would shoulder such a burden without diverting a very large fraction of that money for things that would make people upset (read: lawyers and tax professionals).
(NPM would appear to be the exception to this since it has - at least on paper - the legal resources of Microsoft behind it. But I think it’s largely a quirk of history that the JavaScript packaging ecosystem ended up with a single corporate owner, and no ecosystem I’ve worked with seems eager to pursue a similar relationship.)
kelnos · · focus · HN ↗
I decide to step down, and nominate a trusted contributor as the new maintainer. Do I deserve to still get part of those payments? If so, what percentage do I get, and what does the new maintainer get?
I recently actually did take over maintenance for a Rust crate that was unmaintained and archived (but still widely used). The two (former) maintainers are still active, working on a related piece of software. Would I then deserve to get a cut of payments? Should the original maintainers still get something? Sure, I'm putting in lots of time and work now, but in total I've spent less than 1% of the time they have.
I guess you could adopt what I'd think of as the employment-based method. Whoever is actively maintaining gets payments, and that's it. That feels unsatisfying somehow, though. Ultimately every project would have to decide how to divide the payments, and that feels hard to do equitably in many cases. That's going to create resentment and hurt feelings.
Not saying that invalidates the idea, but it does make it harder on people in practice.
herewulf · · focus · HN ↗