Projects with bigger problems

Projects with bigger problems

How do you stop the equivalent of bots listening to fake music and cashing in?

Because there's no money in that case. There isn't some big pot of ad money that gets shared between projects depending on how many other projects depend on them. Any money that comes in is associated with the project that's willing to give it, and that money goes to the project's dependency tree. A project can only bring in money if and to the extent that other projects willing to give money actually use it as a dependency.

The one way I can see to game the system is that as I described it, the money a project sends to its dependencies is divided equally rather than based on some measure of their relative importance. That gives programmers an incentive to game the system by multiplying dependencies. For example, if I have a project with only one dependency, all my pass-through money goes to that one project. Instead, I could write all the functions in my project as dependencies, one function per dependency, so most of the pass-through money would go to me instead of the other project. Even then, my project has to do something good enough to get people to depend on it in order to bring in any money.