Write blog post on criticality metrics

[vladh]

Chad recently wrote a post on the overall structure of fund distribution. Consumers pay intermediaries (eg thanks.dev) who pay producers (ie projects). But how do intermediaries know how much to pay each project? It seems that projects should be funded according to how “critical” they are to the Open Source ecosystem, so we need a criticality metric.

A post suggesting and comparing criticality metrics would be a good follow-up to Chad's post.

Some ideas:

• The folks at ecosyste.ms say that usage is the best metric — but is it really so simple?
• The Open Source Project Criticality Score takes a lot of factors into account. But is it a good metric? Is just counting dependents the best way to measure use? And is the number of recently updated issues really relevant?
• Platforms like thanks.dev have access to depender codebases. Can we use this advantage to formulate source-aware criticality metrics, where depender codebases are analysed to determine which dependencies are most critical than others?