I really like the idea but maybe talk to your direct point of contact at the client instead?
(1% is likely to small to make a difference, but a fun thought experiment).
After all, if I install a package, which depends on something which depends on something which depends on a library for left-padding strings, it's unlikely the library author sees a cent. And each of those levels doesn't just have developers - they have package maintainers, people doing bug triage, people maintaining test infrastructure - and the tools those people use.
Unfortunately I think this would be very difficult to resolve - as the problem of fairly distributing donations would have a very large political element.
If you want to contribute to open source software in general, Software in the Public Interest is probably the best general fund to stick your money in, since they provide financial support to several distributions, LibreOffice, FFmpeg, Postgres, Xorg, etc.
Also, set your amazon smile donations to go to them, since they are a non-profit!
But I also agree, if those authors don't get a regular stream of income, it is very hard to make a living, specially from native desktop applications.
Very few home users care for books or trainings.
* Knowing who (as an individual or an organization) you can give money to to reliably perform the work. So working out a way of managing this would be huge e.g. I want a feature added to Postgres, who the hell do I speak to? Are they reliable? Is their contribution likely to be accepted upstream?
* The tax/employment logistics can be painful, an intermediary could make that simpler. For large contributions you often have to support multiple people, and this becomes logistical complex VERY easily
* A lot of folks who make their living being supported to work on open source are scornful or outright malevolent towards the things that corps need (e.g. invoicing, statement of work, liability protection)
https://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_support/
Debian has a list of consultants, many of them are Debian developers:
https://www.debian.org/consultants/
In addition there are a bunch of general and specialised open source consultancies, some examples:
http://www.credativ.us/ https://www.igalia.com/ http://collabora.com/ http://codethink.co.uk/ http://catalyst.co.nz/ http://www.sysmocom.de/ https://www.savoirfairelinux.com/
* The 'pay someone to do X, which has Y value for us in return' is a very simple value proposition for even the most luddite of finance/legal folks to grok. The details are different, but you're essentially hiring a contractor.
* On the other hand, it's much less clear to those people what the value proposition is for paying for 'past work' or some amphorphus future work that it's difficult to quantify will have any value to the organization.
* That's why the above is much better framed as 'sponsorship' and put under PR/dev relations/talent/HR. They're the ones who can best track value from concepts like community engagement and enhancement, improved standing of the company etc
I also Patreon to Jon Oxer for superhouse.tv (mainly for his YouTube videos) he's quite involved around various open hardware projects and open source in Australia - maybe not quitenyour traditional definition.
Project maintainers should have the ability to 'forward' part of the received donation to other projects - without which the project wouldn't have been possible.
Which contributors, which dependency and how much to share - these questions are best answered by the project maintainer(s) - they can forward zero or all the funds and make the process automatic, so when a donation is received, the system automatically redistributes it to other accounts, as configured by the maintainer.
I've worked on a design spec for such a system some time ago: https://github.com/boomhub/design
I'd gladly resume work on it if anyone else feels like this is the good way to go. Just start by creating an Issue :).
For example, it's possible to gather some metrics of the usage of libraries from a running process (with strace, google perftools, source maps in javascript...).
It can be a process used by a real user or autotests from the project.
A software could monitor those probes and allow the user to reward the dependencies that:
- use less CPU or energy
- use less memory
- contains less bugs
- ...
If it's another crowdfunding website what makes it different and more likely to succeed compared to others?
The questionnaire seems to be missing "desktop (GUI) apps" and probably "mobile apps" in "What you'd pay for?" section.
Also, the "time/effort" was weird for me; I don't feel it matches "funding" which sounds like money to me — or I didn't understand what it's intended to mean.
Some general thoughts:
On a related note, personally I don't like paying until I tried an app. But then OSS apps often ask for payment only just before/after downloading. I think a deferred approach is one of the reasons which helped me pay (donate) for the single OSS app for which I've done so yet: Calibre (https://calibre-ebook.com/). While the main reason was that it really struck me that it's an awesome, polished and easy to use app (especially for non-technical users in my family) while I was downloading it to n-th computer one day, it also shows some non-obtrusive but visible encouragement in its GUI (a big heart icon — feels encouraging, not nagging) reminding to consider donation.
From other somewhat interesting approaches, Aseprite (https://www.aseprite.org/) is actually GPL IIUC, but it provides the binary only with payment — thus more convenient (esp. for non-technical users, who I assume are majority of the targeted users group, i.e. artists) — although you can still just download and compile the sources for free. I'm very curious to what extent it's actually working for the author!
Moreover, I felt quite nice about itch.io's (http://itch.io/) approach, where a publisher can pick a "payment-optional" model. But as written above, I'd prefer to be gently reminded in-game from time to time (@leafo? whaddya think? feature idea for Refinery?). Also, I didn't really find a good enough game for me on itch yet, for which I'd feel like paying, unfortunately.
Finally, I think it'd be easy for me to pay for OSS games (dunno about other apps?) which would be parts of a bundle (ideally on gog.com; maybe Humble Bundle too, but as much as it started the bundles trend in awesome way, I feel it's fallen in quality and open-ness for me at some point in the past). I'm already paying for bundles, so if an OSS game got in there, I probably wouldn't even notice I can have it for free (nor I would complain later if I noticed, I believe). Though if it'd be explicit, I think I'd pay anyway (custom? convenience?).
P.S. Now that I think of it, seems what I describe here is kinda variation of "in-game/in-app purchases". Hm, maybe they could be also linked to some specially tricky features of an app, e.g. using some feature would also display non-obtrusive info "this feature was really tricky/took much love to implement/and is unique on market — a donation as act of gratitude would be an awesome gesture of appreciation!" obviously with an easy link.
Also, I think receiving a code enabling personalized label/annotation "Paid for by $DONATING_USER" could be a really cool bonus touch.
I've even tried to fund some work on the open source application I maintain, but I haven't been able to get anywhere close to minimum wage for it. Other open source applications in the same space seem to have the same issues with crowdfunding.
