At which point if I’m expected to give a dollar to each of them, then I’m basically screwed. I’ve seen some licenses trying to claim “1% of your revenue if you use my package”… But if I use 1000 of them I now owe 10x my revenue to a bunch of “leftpad” libraries?

Or am I somehow supposed to give like… 10000 3 penny donations? How would that even work? The costs to “donate” a dollar to someone with modern banking (once the CC and whatever donation site takes their cut) almost makes it not worth it.

Especially once indirect dependencies get pulled in (which is a large part of the FOSS ecosystem… tons of people use ffmpeg without ever realizing they are) how does that work? If I use a library, and that library suddenly adds 20 more dependencies, do I need to shell out $20? Or am I as a maintainer supposed to divvy up any donations I get to every library I used (I bet you used a compiler to build whatever your tool is).

It’s rough, and I don’t see it really working for anything but a few special snowflake projects. It’s just not workable at the scale FOSS has turned into. A blessing a curse I suppose.

The example for me immediately showed my overlap bug with “eightwo”. There aren’t too many other ways to make this ten words overlap. 🙂