"1% to Open Source" has a nice ring to it. And that should go for not only individuals' pay, but 1% of company revenue from businesses that use open source as well.

That would be a strong selling point from a hiring standpoint. Heck if Google/Apple/Facebook donated 1% of revenue to OSS did that maybe we wouldn't need this service at all.

I love this as a job perk. Get paid while giving back.

Why should the employees be funding the savings that accrue to their employers?

Now imagine if every employer saving 10 devs or more per year worth of work on top of open OSes, languages, platforms, runtimes, webservers, etc gave a fraction of those savings to the various projects...

So at that point, why not just have all those used-daily projects be sold commercially instead of (or in addition to) being OSS in the first place?

That would be fine, too. But consider the complexity of buying 20 things vs. spending once and disbursing. The value is to reduce the difficulty of being a good person.

That would make collaboration much much more difficult :)

That's such a brilliant idea. What if there was a website where people could divide up which OSS projects their $1k or 1% goes to? It could be anonymous, pseudonymous, or public, depending on how bold the philanthropist was.

Well let's bang out some details right here. First, payments. Taking them and then disbursing them. In terms of taking, we'd need a subscription, and probably monthly. In terms of disbursing, I'd like to aim for 100% with operating costs coming from people voluntarily adding us to their basket. Locating the actual target of the money is also potentially difficult. It's easy for some projects (Redis -> antirez) hard for others (node -> Ryan Dahl???). Also, would have to take into account some OSS has deep backing, and probably doesn't need money. Last but not least, taxes.

To summarize: before beginning I'd like to find similar systems ('competition'), how to locate recipients, and how to move the money around without losing any of it to fees, ideally. The marketing angle is easy: 6-figure devs might like the idea of giving in this way. Your basket could even be a sharable point of pride.

> Locating the actual target of the money is also potentially difficult.

You'd almost always want it to go to appropriate foundations (501(c)3 or equivalent), not individuals, except when supporting projects that really only have a single developer and no organization behind them. That also makes it easier for companies and individuals to give, since they can deduct it from their taxes.

Hmm. I guess I was envisioning the service as being the non-profit, and the disbursement need not be to other non-profits.

But this brings up a few interesting points. First, if you give only to the founder, and not the contributor, will this engender resentment? Second, ideally the result would be that the founder would work more on the project in a consistent way, but that sort of gift would need to be something more along the lines of a stipend over the course of a year or two. Third, if the amounts were large enough (which would be the case if every 6-figure dev gave $1k/year), you could do something along the lines of the MacArthur foundation so-called "genius grants".

Foundation, not founder; foundations are required to be much more accountable with funds than individuals are. I'm suggesting in most circumstances that it's preferable to give to an accountable organization chartered with the stewardship of a project, rather than to any particular individual.

Well this is a useful discussion, because I'm realizing how much I want to give the maker/user community itself the power to hold itself accountable. To take your point to the logical conclusion is to assert that all successful OSS projects should have a foundation, or even a for-profit org. I'd like to see something looser, a dynamic, democratic assignment of value by those who benefit the most.

You can kind of already do this via the Open Source Collective: https://opencollective.com/opensource (but not as fully featured as what you're suggesting)

Your're talking about something like ASCAP or BMI for software.