A new MIT license*, that forces larger firms, to pay any none-zero amount to support OSS maintainers.
You probably have hundreds of packages. The main reason your firm don’t sponsor them today, is that it requires paperwork.
The non profit nudge.us.org will send reminders and enforce large firms to pay anything but zero.
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For org admins this calculates a recommended monthly invoice based on your dependencies. 100% distributed to maintainers. We will make it as easy as possible for your admin to pay it. Even easier than not paying.
The nudge.us extension
What you pay is up to you, we want to suggest a good default. But how should we distribute fees across your 100 OSS dependencies?
It is hard to find a metric that can’t be gamed easily.
Imagine you are the github admin of AwesomeCorp with 100 devs. Your codebase has 200 direct dependencies. You choose to donate 20 usd per dev. If you apply an even split between all packages, this will cause an incentive problem: Maintainers will notice, that splitting their package into 5 different packages 5Xes their income.
PageRank: the importance of a page is judged by the number of pages linking to it as well as their importance.
I propose a variant of pageRank called NudgeRank. It’s goal is to calculate the share each packages gets from the 2k USD pool. Instead of counting linking pages we count github stars. This means if anybody stars a repo, that repo will get paid more out of the pool. But your repo is starred by maintainers of repos, that have many stars themselves, this will have a much bigger impact.
This algorithm is merely a recommendation offered inside the extension, and can be improved or replaced over time.
A non profit that supports the enforcement of these non zero payments and provides an implementation of the above tools.
If we do a bad job, replace us. If our tools are bad, replace them.