Providing kickbacks to the repos being scraped would be a good way to help fund open source projects and pay creators like streaming services do. Seems like they're headed in this direction - it would be a massive product differentiator over GH

My first reaction was that I really like this idea.

If we had a system where people who access projects pay and popular FOSS developers get paid for it we'd have much better alignment.

My second thought was that bots would immediately try to circumvent such a plan. They'd probably spam Gitlab with fake repos to try to harvest those payouts.

Three minutes after kickbacks were announced there would be a flurry of new repos being created with bots repeatedly scraping them just to get those kickbacks.