I have drafted a proposal for what I call “The Dependency Funding Tool” (TDFT).
It’s purpose is to provide funding to all free software projects, regardless of their proximity or visible to the people utilizing them.
TL;DR
- The tool relies on a federated graph of project (as nodes) connected by dependencies (directed and weighted edges)
- To calculate how reliant one project is on another all paths between the two projects in the dependency graph are taken, their edge weights multiplied and then summed up.
- The tool analyzes the usage of a person and creates a list of projects they are directly or indirectly reliant on by calculating for each program they interact with directly all the projects they depend on and sorting them by their dependency.
- The tool can be configured to send automatic recurring fees or direct people to a project’s CONTRIBUTE files.
See: socialcoding