This will immediately bias the submissions only coming in from the west. Remember you can make the fee small but sometimes a person can't even pay even if they have the money. I remember having the 1000 or so rupees required for some VPS stuff when I was a teenager and not being able to pay since I didn't have a credit card. I hope we don't ever make money a barrier to open source.
> I hope we don't ever make money a barrier to open source.
Then make some other very cumbersome proof. But it's still better to cut off half the world from open source than pollute the few large software repositories with spam, which would dissuade everyone everywhere from contributing eventually.
There's no problem contributing to a library from anywhere it's just that you collaborate with someone who in turn can pay the reg/anti-spam fee.
I don't understand this obsession with solving everything with money. It doesn't event solve this problem, just because someone payed the fee doesn't mean their code is not spam. You can't keep the fee small enough and still dissuade spammers.
You can do reputation, or money, or some "proof of work". Or you can do all of them. But money is by far the easiest one to implement. You could e.g. either require the votes of 3 separate maintainers of packages totaling 100k downloads in order to upload a new package, or you could have a $10 fee.
The reason money is natural is because there is a cost associated with manually vetting all packages.
Everything is easy if all you care about the KPIs your system performs well in. Making any system with money is easy if you don't care about equality or fairness.
Having cash and having means to spend that cash online while living in a random country are two very different things.
It's easy to get a Visa/Mastercard in the US. It gets a bit trickier in some EU countries. Then the further from the west you go, the more complicated it gets, all the way down to impossible if you live in a place that the US isn't on friendly terms with (like Iran or Russia).
If you auto-assume everyone can pay any amount online (even if it's a refundable $1 for verification purposes), you're gonna cut off access to a lot of people unintentionally, while only raising the bar a little bit for spammers.
You'd have to get cryptocoins in the first place, and there are countries which ban all kinds of cryptocurrency (China) or place it behind onerous KYC requirements (EU, US).
Dude I couldn't get a credit card in India, do you think a young person can easily get bitcoin? Its not that I was banned from getting it, its just that I couldn't afford it and getting it was really hard. Getting bitcoin, starting from fiat, is equally hard.
This will immediately bias the submissions only coming in from the west. Remember you can make the fee small but sometimes a person can't even pay even if they have the money. I remember having the 1000 or so rupees required for some VPS stuff when I was a teenager and not being able to pay since I didn't have a credit card. I hope we don't ever make money a barrier to open source.