App idea for Linux: An app where I set a regular amount that I want to donate each week/month, and then it locally and privately logs how much time I spend using the different apps on my machine and distributes the money accordingly.
With different options to blacklist some apps, weigh some apps more than others, always give X amount to some apps regardless of use, also give to things that won't be tracked (like the DE), etc.
@forteller I'd love this for websites, too - a sort of "Ko-fi aggregator", where you set a budget for each month, record websites you want to contribute to as you go along, and then the software divvies up the funds and pays them out
@forteller nice idea. Data driven donations! I am pretty sure @EndlessOS have some of this in that they have a tool which can gather metrics about what applications you use. They talked about it at a Linux Application Summit a few years back. Maybe @wjt or @cassidy know the detail?
The data does not persist locally, and on the server is totally anonymous so could not give you the data you'd need for this good idea.
We're also interested in keeping local app usage timers for parental controls and digital wellbeing. My pet bad idea is a Spotify Wrapped-style “You were in the top 5% of Nautilus users this month" toy...
@forteller Keep in mind that many of the best "apps" on GNU/Linux are made out of love and setting up and dealing with donations is just ... weird, and takes more away from the motivation than it offers.
Obviously doesn't apply to everything, but IMHO you're better off donating to your distro or GNOME or something like that, which actively funds a broad set of developers, often with stuff like travel expenses for meetups etc. (Speaking as someone who's been the recipient of such funding)
@forteller And there's SO MUCH you don't see or think of as "apps" that absolutely could use funding. By all means, DO donate if you have favorite apps etc, but the majority of contributors are completely invisible to the average user. Packagers, those who make build tools, the countless sysadmins keeping FOSS infrastructure running, translators, sub system developers (you might enjoy such features as "sound" and "displaying stuff on a monitor"). These are often overlooked in direct donations.
@kly@fortellerIdeally such an app would take into account the dependencies of things too.
Maybe it could simply sample "running processes" and use their runtime to "credit" that binary, as well as all .so that it loads -- that is, all its dependencies.
This wouldn't quite capture things correctly (e.g. statically-linked dependencies, header-only libraries, etc) but might be interesting nonetheless
@meejah@forteller Taking into account the entire chain of tools and infrastructure involved is just completely unrealistic and trying to design something like that is an utter waste of time. Even if you tracked every single cpu cycle on your pc 100% accurately, you wouldn't even come close to covering everything involved in the development of your distro.
There is a gigantic pipeline involved, which includes stuff like the preferred text editor of every single developer.
@meejah@forteller no, it would not! We don't measure contributions by lines of code. You can't quantify who should be funded and how much without taking into account the immense amount of work required that never results in a single line of code.
Someone has to organize community events. Someone has to acquire the infrastructure. Someone has to moderate forums or mail lists. These are real and valuable contributions completely ignored by your approach, and the list goes on.
@kly@forteller I'm not suggesting LoC is a measure; I meant that "favourite editor" would be captured by a tool to help you gauge your own usage of software.
Anyway, sure, we can't make a perfect measuring device so I guess we should just do nothing instead.
@meejah@forteller Yes, when it comes to making tools to track exactly what we are doing on our computers we should do nothing at all.
When it comes to funding, see my original suggestion about donating to distros or umbrella organizations, with an optional bonus to favourite projects if they are asking for donations.
@kly@forteller So you butt into a conversation about a nice suggestion for a (local-only, 100% consensual) tool to help people determine what they should donate to in order to say "you shouldn't want that".
Cool, cool.
@forteller
to track data about what you use, use #arbtt.
it will be very useful to output what you use and how much. you can then get statistics and make the gifts accordingly. that would be a good first step :)
@tykayn Agreed. The automatic donation part of this idea will be very, very hard indeed to implement. But it would be really cool if someone would make an app that just does the tracking part and gives you some nice looking statistics and tells you how much you should donate to each project according to how much you want to give each time period.
The stats part might even create some hype, just looks for example at how popular it is to share that Spotify Wrapped thing each year.
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