If we had a reliable way to identify contributors there might be nice ways to build on top of that. Like semi automatic donation services that uses id keys of the list of contributors.
Never going to work. Someone will cheat the system by creating multiple identities in order to get more than their fair share. Besides, how do you even measure what’s fair automatically.
And likewise, automatically distributing money per dependency will just make people split projects into multiple parts to get more of the money, or to add fake dependencies.
Donations need humans in the loop to decide where the money should go.
That's why I said semi automatic. It should always be up to a human to decide exactly who gets the money and how much. But there could be systems that makes it easier for that human to make such decision and worry about the important parts of it.
The automatic parts can consist of listing candidates, link to their contributions and handling of the transactions, not selection.
We already have put cash into the equation. There are donation buttons on many repos nowadays. Should we fight against that or should we try to make better use of it?
That should mitigate against fake dependencies, but not splitting important projects into multiple equally important projects, unless this engine also incorporated something like SLOC or number of commits (either of which would make splitting a net zero) but those are non-metrics as well...even more readily abused.
Not following what your point is here? I'm not promoting metrics. I'm just saying we should allow lifting up the whole software supply chain for donation driven projects.
Just saying how any tooling to automate the process would be easy to game all the way down, so the due diligence toward donating has really got to be a manual human effort.
