- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micropayment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro-donation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_models_for_open-source_software#Voluntary_donations


http://alternativeto.net/software/gittip/
  (TIL GitTip is now Gratipay)
  - https://gratipay.com/about/

...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalization_table
... 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bug_bounty_program
...


On Saturday, July 23, 2016, Nicholas Chammas <nicholas.chammas@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sat, Jul 23, 2016 at 3:35 PM Daniel Holth <dholth@gmail.com> wrote:
Have you seen https://rubytogether.org ? It looks like exactly what you are proposing, only with more blocks.

Interesting. I hadn't heard of that before now.

I'm not sure what you mean by "with more blocks", but that idea seems focused on funding core Ruby infrastructure, whereas I'm proposing a way for users to fund any Python project they want, with the added benefit that by funding those projects they automatically also fund core Python infrastructure too.

A rough -- but in my view very apt -- analogy for what I'm proposing would be the iOS App Store. Users buy apps they want; when that happens, the app developers benefit by getting paid for their work, and the general iOS ecosystem also benefits since the maintainer of that ecosystem, Apple, gets a cut of those payments.

Of course, in our case we are talking about voluntary monetary contributions and not prices, and we are talking about tiny fees and not 15-30% cuts. But the basic idea is the same: Fund the core infrastructure by capturing some of the value generated by that infrastructure.

The core infrastructure would be things like PyPI, tooling like pip, and Python itself. The value generated by that infrastructure, for the purposes of this discussion, would be the monetary contributions people made to projects they appreciated. And capturing some of that value would be taking a tiny cut out of those contributions and reinvesting it in the core.

Nick