Besides the fact that this would limit access to those projects for those unable to pay, there are the issues of multiple contributors and transient dependencies.
Say a project is started by one person, made open source, and becomes popular. They start accepting contributions from the public, including substantial features and bug fixes. They later move on and someone else becomes the lead maintainer. Who would receive the money in your scheme? The original author? The current maintainer? Divvied up among anyone who has ever touched the code? If the Digital Ocean tshirt giveaway is anything to go by, popular paid projects would be overwhelmed by "contributors" hoping to snag a slice for changing around a few words. It gets really complicated pretty quickly.
Say a project depends on one or more of these paid projects - does it now require payment of at least as much as the sum of its dependencies, and their dependencies, etc? That could add up quickly unless there's some scaling factor and you hope those projects make it up in volume. Surely there will be typosquatting projects which are (at best) wrappers for real ones and siphon off some of the fees.
And so on. All this is just to say that it's complicated and the details matter.
Also, if we extended this idea of paying for all the software people use, the whole thing would fall over very quickly. I don't think most developers here have ever sent Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler any money for zlib/gzip? And how many have sent checks to the people who've been contributing to the linux kernel? And gnu file utils and bin utils and compilers? And the openssl project? And OpenBSD for openssh? And any of the other hundreds of bits of code that they rely on on a daily basis to get their work done.
At the end of the day if you want to get paid for your work, don't give it away under a free license. This is the second major story -- that I've seen anyway -- in the last couple of weeks about people wanting to be paid for the software that they freely give away. It reminds me of the time I went to Rome and a man came up to me and slipped a string bracelet around my wrist. When I told him I didn't want it, he said "no, no, it's free. just a friendly gift." and when I said thanks and turned to walk away he got mad that I didn't give him any money. Apparently it's a typical scam. "Give a gift" but then demand a return donation of money.
> They start accepting contributions from the public, including substantial features and bug fixes.
I spent a considerable amount of weekends helping out with a FS2020 mod. The maintainer now accepts donations and makes a considerable sum. I got none of that. Personally, it left a bad taste in my mouth. I maintain a private fork now, because I don't like the idea of someone profiting off my rare nights and weekend work. It would be one thing if he recognized the work and/or gave back to the contributors in some way, but they don't... so I stopped contributing publically.
Let the maintainer monetize release versions. If new releases have major contributions from others, charge for the new release and dole out funds to the contributors.
Certainly some thought needs to be put into how to monetize this, but we haven’t ever even tried. I’d say something like NPM is sort of like how Uber/Lyft built and validated the ride sharing infrastructure - it works, it’s normalized. Now how do you manage the money between the drivers and riders.
It’s not like software devs and companies are broke and are unwilling to pay modest amounts, and we will always support free for non-commercial.
Say a project is started by one person, made open source, and becomes popular. They start accepting contributions from the public, including substantial features and bug fixes. They later move on and someone else becomes the lead maintainer. Who would receive the money in your scheme? The original author? The current maintainer? Divvied up among anyone who has ever touched the code? If the Digital Ocean tshirt giveaway is anything to go by, popular paid projects would be overwhelmed by "contributors" hoping to snag a slice for changing around a few words. It gets really complicated pretty quickly.
Say a project depends on one or more of these paid projects - does it now require payment of at least as much as the sum of its dependencies, and their dependencies, etc? That could add up quickly unless there's some scaling factor and you hope those projects make it up in volume. Surely there will be typosquatting projects which are (at best) wrappers for real ones and siphon off some of the fees.
And so on. All this is just to say that it's complicated and the details matter.