Introducing GitRoyalty–the First Open Source Paywall

I’ve been an open source developer since I was in high school. It’s part of who I am as a software engineer, and I’ve learned so much and met so many along the way. About 5 years later, it even helped me land my first job, which was the first time I got paid for programming in my life. All of a sudden my time had a real dollar value, and I started looking at programming from the lens of a responsible, bill-paying adult (in California). Needless to say, I found myself working on my open source projects less and less. Issues and pull requests piled up and I felt something that many other OSS developers know all too well–maintainer guilt. On one hand I used open source projects on a daily basis at my job, and on the other hand I could barely find time to contribute back to the community when I got home. This is when I realized just how shambled the current state of open source really is: a network of overworked maintainers and an increasing demand of open source software.

On a more philosophical note, mankind is at the beginning of everything. The internet is at its infancy, and we’ve yet to reap the impending sci-fi miracles of artificial intelligence, automation, and augmented reality. And just as open source powers the basis of almost all software today, it will be the crux of all software to come as well. Demand for open source will increase faster than we’ve ever seen before, and supply will dwindle by the likes of me–guilty maintainers trying to juggle full-time jobs, bills, life, and a couple hours of open source work on the weekends.

To put things more clearly, let’s use an analogy–imagine if Amazon sold everything for free. “Sellers” would be giving away items for free, and “buyers” would take whatever they could get their hands on as long as it somehow filled a void in their life. This supply-demand relationship is unsustainable, short sighted, and doomed to implode. This is open source today, and the imbalance seems to be getting ever more dire by the day.

But we can fix this, together as a community. As an open source developer myself, I know the exact solution to our impending demise detailed above: money. That is, money for each and every open source contributor–not just the Twitter-famous maintainers that happen to own popular GitHub repositories. I mean everyone from junior programmers making README edits to invisible gurus behind transitive dependencies with billions of downloads.

And I’ve built something that I hope will use this imperative to spark a shift in perspective around open source consumption.

It’s called GitRoyalty, https://gitroyalty.com. And I’m so excited to share it with you all starting today. I’m so confident in the purpose and technology behind what GitRoyalty does, that I use it for my 2.6k star project Disk.

GitRoyalty works by “hiding” key files in your open source repository from the public. This can include a manifest file or built script, such as package.json, setup.py, .gemspec, Package.swift, etc. — a file that is necessary for dependency managers such as NPM to install and use your package in users’ projects. This way the rest of your code remains public on GitHub for anyone to inspect and contribute to, while a metadata file required to install the package is hidden behind a paywall.

Users are then directed to a payment page from your README, e.g. https://gitroyalty.com/saoudrizwan/Disk. Here they set up a monthly subscription in exchange for a license key used to install the package. GitRoyalty rate limits license keys using IP addresses and even supports transitive dependencies (dependencies of dependencies). Subscription proceeds are then distributed to each and every developer of a project based on their contributions.

I’ve written a ton more about how GitRoyalty works and how you can get your own projects configured with it in our docs: https://gitroyalty.com/docs

Whether you’re a seasoned open source maintainer or a complete newbie to programming, I encourage you to set up a project on GitRoyalty — it’s completely free and we only charge a fee when transactions are made.

I want to create a workforce of open source developers who can maintain a healthy work/life balance while giving their open source work the attention that it deserves and is necessary for the next wave of software revolutions. GitRoyalty is my manifestation of that ambition and I hope that we as a community can turn open source into a network that gives back to its developers as much as it pays forward.

Please feel free to reach out to me on Twitter, email, or chat with me live on gitroyalty.com!