What kind of Software should we fund?

Laurie Voss, who was one of the founder of NPM, the Javascript package repository that is now run by Microsoft, has written a longer post about an idea about how to fund Free Software that I found interesting. It’s worth reading if you have some time and makes good points even though I will critique it a bit. But financing Free Software is an unsolved problem right now and any meaningful contribution can help us move this forward. So, let’s dive in Laurie’s idea is quite simple: We need a way to force companies to pay for Free Software and the package repositories (NPM, PyPI, etc) are the ideal chokepoint to enforce that payment. The package repositories should force companies to pay for access and distribute the money among the packages that were being used: Second, a fixed slice of that revenue is a royalty, and it goes to the packages. Not to the registry, not to a foundation, not to a grants committee with an application form. Pro rata, to every package that shows up in the paying…