Integrating npm
Towards funding the long tail of open source
Gratipay is on a quest to help companies fund the long tail of open source. Without funding, our digital infrastructure crumbles. Heartbleed is the headline, and led to the creation of the Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII). Three years later, OpenSSL and other projects are stronger, and we are all safer, thanks to the support the industry has shown through CII.
That said, CII only funded 14 projects last year. Libraries.io lists millions of open source packages, and only covers language ecosystems (no apt or yum). While today’s status quo works well for headline projects, it does not reach the long tail, where most of open source lives. We need all of open source to be healthy, from Linux to left-pad.
We have more work to do.
At Gratipay, we think the answer to the problem of funding the long tail of open source is both social and technical. Today, we are taking a technical step forward by integrating the npm package manager directly into Gratipay. In its metadata, npm provides an email address for each package maintainer. Using this email, we’ve made it a little bit easier for package maintainers to apply to use Gratipay to receive funding for their project.
This integration also paves the way for future improvements. Of course, we would like to integrate additional package managers. But the real innovation we’re pursuing is aggregation, because we think that’s going to be important for reaching the long tail. Potential features along the way include:
- pledging to projects that haven’t signed up yet,
- claiming many packages at once, and
- funding all of the projects in your
package.json.
We are also doing a lot of thinking about the social component of helping companies fund the long tail of open source. Stay tuned on that, and join us at the Sustain conference next month to be part of the conversation.
Until then, we invite you to search for your npm packages on Gratipay and apply to join, so that you can receive funding for your open source work!
