Steam devs if you are reading this: add a checkbox on your checkout screen that will allow me to donate 10% or a flat amount with each purchase, that will go directly to your upstream opensource dependencies like Wine & friends. I would add money to each purchase without blinking to support these people and I think the correct place for this is at the steam checkout screen, in the case for gamers.
This is a nice idea, but how do you follow through in practice? Who decides what counts as an "upstream dependency", where do you draw the line? Is the Linux kernel included? Are desktop environments included? How do you decide how much of the pot goes to each project, does curl get an equal amount to Wine? Why/why not?
As I said, it's a nice idea but I have a feeling the complexity behind making this work well is what might have kept them from doing it.
So the steam devs can most likely produce a finite list of all their dependencies. They can then take a day or two to score each one with a weight. Then they use the weights to determine how to split the funds. Or they can have an open source champion person internally that takes care of relationships with opensource projects and can release funds to them as needed. Point is, lets say they accumulate $1M/year this way, it is that person's responsibility to distribute it fully back out to the community. Obviously try to keep it super simple & transparent. They can even ask game developers each quarter who they should think need money or which problems were solved well for them this round, as an extra layer of input.
This extends past linux. Open source projects get used broadly regardless of runtime environment. Steam is just one open nerve ending where this could be used for good and they have the power to do so (and from what we've seen, steam seems to be a low friction company, less corpo red tape - would you trust say Ubisoft with handling this or steam?). If a game gets deployed to windows, it doesn't matter, as each game/application probably use five or ten or more open source projects regardless of where they run. It can help open source devs keep pacing with steam and game developer needs. Remember a ton of these project have upstream effects outside of gaming - its just the most obvious open nerve we can use to help open source.
You can only show the checkbox on Linux. You can add OS detection to the checkbox and have it say "support our $OS dependencies" and put that into different pots of money. You can make the checkbox say "support our Linux dependencies" and then rely on Windows people not selecting it.
When it comes to Wine, aren't they already doing this? Steam develops Proton in cooperation with CodeWeavers, who are the main sponsors of Wine, and parts of that work is upstreamed to the Wine project. The NTSYNC patch from what I can tell was also submitted by a CodeWeavers employee, so it doesn't seem far-fetched to say that Steam probably contributed to making this happen in Wine.
There are many other open source projects that gets used that never sees the spotlight like Wine does, but they are crucial too. Think audio codecs & processing, compression libs, networking libs, even sqlite. Our society depends on these projects too but there are too much friction for normal people to contribute to them (if they are even aware). Steam checkout is a low friction surface where normal people spend time. A small optional checkbox at the bottom with a two sentence explanation or link to a blog post to explain where the money goes, will add minimal new friction while giving people the opportunity to contribute to something meaningful. I think many gamers (esp adult ones) knows what open source means and they will actually contribute now & then. Fund allocations must be transparent (crucial!) so people can see where the money went.
Oh absolutely, I would welcome some way of sponsoring such projects in general. I just meant to highlight that for this particular feature and project, there is already a form of sponsorship happening.
