I think this is a great idea. I would love to build it, but don't think I have the breadth of knowledge necessary. Does anything already exist like the CLI tool to determine what OS packages are in your project?
Stackshare could be a basic source, as an example, check Airbnb:
http://stackshare.io/airbnb/airbnb
(so a company imports its Stackshare profile & you make a list of the open source projects they're using, and if you have donation information from those projects you show it)
That's a superb idea, but I think that would happen after first getting the basic donation information. I will set up a website to gather this with a description of what the project is trying to accomplish, and see if it gets any traction.
I think http://donate.money would be a great place for this.
Yes, let me know, I'll be happy to help and/or continue the brainstorming You can ping me: matias AT insaurral.de :D
Thanks! I'll shoot you an email
I think the first step is a website that has all of the donation information. This has a search engine to query projects, and the ability to submit / edit information like a wiki. This step needs to happen first. Once this is working, you can start building tools off of this information, like the rest API and the scanning tool.
Central repository (database with website and API frontends) that contains links to donation pages for all open source software. This is crowdsourced information. So if you search for "spark", apache spark appears with link to donation page, and of course more obscure packages will be added as well.
Then a CLI tool is written that scans your code base. This is an open source tool, so for node it will look in NPM packages, for C projects it will look at the make files, etc. Developers can write custom code to detect their own packages if it's not standard.
The output of the CLI tool calls an API at the central repository that creates a report, so you can go to the URL and see all the open source packages you use and links to donate to them.
Now, here is the final piece that would make it so much better, but is more difficult: the central repository itself is a non-profit organization, so instead of having to go to each library's donation page, you donate directly to the central repo (perhaps a set amount every month), and once a month the central repo donates all of the amounts taken in. So if you only want to donate $10 a month, but use 500 open source projects, that's OK, because once a month the central repo will add up all the donations and donate one lump sum. Of course you can change the ratios of donations if you want, so some projects get more of your donation per month than others, and you can remove projects you don't want to donate to even if you use them.
In this way, individuals and companies can fairly compensate all the developers of the open source software they use, easily and fairly, in the amount they can afford.
At the end of the year, you only have to write off your donations to the central repo, and not the hundreds of open source projects, as the central repo is a non profit.
Thoughts?