What if the operating system had functionality to somehow trace the usage of each of the various FOSS systems (via processor time or something), and then allowed you to automatically say "I want to donate $100 to the projects that I use, tell me where it should go." The OS could give you a report that shows you how much you actually use each of the various OSS subsystems on the platform, and perform an automatic percentage-wise allocation to the various organizations involved which take centralized donations? The user could overweight or underweight according to "fuzzy" factors ("I just love my torrent client so much"). It would of course require centralized repositories of where to send money for which project, but it seems like that could be reasonably tied to the package repositories themselves. Users could even set up automatic payments (if they are particularly charitable); register their credit card with the OS and say "divvy out $10 per month based on usage", thereby prompting far more sustainable and predictable donation streams for projects... This could theoretically lead to unreasonable overweighting of various things (the lower-level the component, the more higher level systems use them, the more processor time is allocated to code running in that layer, etc etc); the measurement method might get tricky, but seems like there must be some "good enough" method for determining usage.
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What if the operating system had functionality to somehow trace the usage of each of the various FOSS systems (via processor time or something), and then allowed you to automatically say "I want to donate $100 to the projects that I use, tell me where it should go." The OS could give you a report that shows you how much you actually use each of the various OSS subsystems on the platform, and perform an automatic percentage-wise allocation to the various organizations involved which take centralized donations? The user could overweight or underweight according to "fuzzy" factors ("I just love my torrent client so much"). It would of course require centralized repositories of where to send money for which project, but it seems like that could be reasonably tied to the package repositories themselves. Users could even set up automatic payments (if they are particularly charitable); register their credit card with the OS and say "divvy out $10 per month based on usage", thereby prompting far more sustainable and predictable donation streams for projects... This could theoretically lead to unreasonable overweighting of various things (the lower-level the component, the more higher level systems use them, the more processor time is allocated to code running in that layer, etc etc); the measurement method might get tricky, but seems like there must be some "good enough" method for determining usage.