OpenFare: Micropayment funded software

#1

Hello,

It’s wonderful to come across this forum. I’m very interested in the sort of topics discussed here.

If I may, I would like to share my project in the hope that it might be helpful to some of you. Please forgive me if this is considered spam.

OpenFare is a protocol and software tool for funding source-available software contributors. It attempts to push the boundaries in the following ways:

  • Charge micro-fees for tiny software libraries.
  • Programmatically eliminate buy-side overheads for managing fee obligations (satisfying fee obligations, selecting payment plans, etc).
  • Pay contributors for small contributions.
  • Facilitate contributor funds share split negotiation.
  • Donations that reach every developer which have contributed to a software dependency tree.

Whilst avoiding gatekeeping and lock-in user accounts. Further, project owners don’t handle funds. Funding share paid direct to contributors.

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#2

A very interesting project you have got there.

It would certainly increase contributor payability across an entire dependency tree.

But what is currently missing that I think is crucial to its success is integration into payment schemes and package managers.

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#3

Dependency tree does not start, nor end in software, therefore NEO (in the rovas.app) generalized the idea to be applicable across domains. A payment made to buy (say) a gps device, thus can benefit all who contributed (miners, plastic makers, documentation writers, programmers,…). Domain specific nuances can be handled as plugins to such a generic framework.

One thing that I have been grappling with is scalability - how to efficiently allocate minuscule amounts to potentially hundreds of thousands (millions) of people. This of course is out of scope of this forum, but if somebody can point me to a theoretical work that deal with this issue, I would be grateful.

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#4

Thanks for taking a look!

integration into payment schemes

What do you mean by “payment schemes”? Do you mean things like recurrent donations?

missing that I think is crucial to its success is integration into […] package managers

The OpenFare tool can currently parse NPM (Javascript) and Cargo (Rust) packages. The idea is to have a single tool which handles every kind of package. Does that seem like a reasonable stratergy to you?

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#5

Thanks for taking a look!

I’m not sure how OpenFare compares to rovas.app .
I think of OpenFare as just a way to get funds to contributors. Ultimately, developers will decide how they would like to be paid and how much. It’s like a bar code and checkout system in a high street shop.

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#6

So payment schemes would be things like Patreon or Github Sponsors.

I couldn’t find what package managers were supported, but yeah you’re doing what I’m thinking is a good idea.

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