[Distutils] Contributing money to package authors/maintainers via PyPI

[Nicholas Chammas]

This may be a heretical idea, and it’s definitely not something anyone is
likely to take on anytime soon, but I’d like to put it up for discussion
and see what people think.

I often find myself wanting to show gratitude to the authors or maintainers
of a package by giving money. Most of the time, it is easier for me to give
money than time. After all, contributing time in a meaningful way to a
project can be quite difficult. I wonder how many others find themselves in
a similar situation, wanting to chip a few bucks in as a token of gratitude
for someone’s work, either one-time or on an ongoing basis.

You can already do this today, of course, with services like PayPal,
Gratipay <https://gratipay.com/>, and Salt <https://salt.bountysource.com/>.
But the process is scattered and different for each Python package and the
group of people behind it. What’s more, it seems wrong that these
third-party services should capture some of the value generated by the
Python community (e.g. by charging some transaction fee) without any of it
going back to support that community (e.g. via the PSF).

So that raises the question: How about if people could contribute money to
the people behind projects they felt grateful for via PyPI? PyPI is already
the community’s central package hub. Perhaps it could also be the
community’s central hub for contributing money.

The central goal would be to create a low-friction ecosystem of monetary
contributions that benefits Python package authors/maintainers, as well as
the larger Python ecosystem. At a high-level, the ecosystem would be
opt-in, and contributions would go directly to their intended recipients,
with tiny cuts of each transaction going to the payment processor and some
Python community organization like the PSF.

I know a more concrete proposal would have to address a lot of details
(e.g. like how to split contributions across multiple maintainers), and
perhaps there is no way to find the resources to build or maintain such a
thing in the first place. But just for now I’d like to separate essence of
idea from the practical concerns of implementing it.

Assume the work is already done, and we have such a system of monetary
contributions in place today. My questions are:

   - Would such a system benefit the Python community?
   - Would the cut of transactions that went to the PSF (or similar) be
   enough to cover the cost of maintaining the system and meaningfully impact
   other Python efforts?
   - Would such a system create perverse incentives?
   - Would it just be a dud that very few people would use?

I’m trying to get a feel for whether the idea has any potential.

Nick
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