https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flattr figured out some parts of this. Notably, you picked your own total monthly donation, and then clicked a button on participating sites to allocate a fraction of your total to them. AFAICT it worked as advertised, but raised new issues with donation behavior. E.g. I obviously like curl every month, so should I click its button monthly? Twice monthly? If I am a developer of some other useful OSS software, should I click curl's button and the curl devs click my button? Does the money just slosh around between merchant-customers? Is that good?
Comments
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flattr figured out some parts of this. Notably, you picked your own total monthly donation, and then clicked a button on participating sites to allocate a fraction of your total to them. AFAICT it worked as advertised, but raised new issues with donation behavior. E.g. I obviously like curl every month, so should I click its button monthly? Twice monthly? If I am a developer of some other useful OSS software, should I click curl's button and the curl devs click my button? Does the money just slosh around between merchant-customers? Is that good?
See also: Kachingle (2007), Amazon Flexible Payment Service (2007), Dwolla (2008), Tipjoy (2008), Facebook Credits (2009), Google Checkout (2006), Flattr (2010), Changetip (2014)