Support "collective" property as fallback fo "funding"

[znarf]

Following up on a comment I shared here: #273 (review)

There are many packages using the collective property today to expose their Open Collective URL. Would be great to support that when funding is not found. While we wait for maintainers to add it.

The syntax of collective is similar to the one of funding, making the implementation uncomplicated.

It's also nice that this allow anyone to test the new npm fund feature and see results today, while in the current state it's giving (at least for me) only empty results for all the projects I tested.

[ljharb]

This seems like it's highly privileging one funding mechanism, effectively forever, and removing any incentive for OpenCollective-backed projects to switch to "funding".

[znarf]

@ljharb Understand your point. The goal is just to leverage prior art and make the fund command more useful from day one. Forever? That can be dropped after a few releases if this is a problem.

Anyway, at Open Collective, we will actively engage to make the funding property a success. We already notified maintainers about it, wrote a blog post https://blog.opencollective.com/beyond-post-install/ and will integrate it in our onboarding tools.

[ljharb]

Dropping it would be semver-major; and the ecosystem thrash would likely make it not worth it to ever do so. There’s a bunch of github-specific things in npm that aren’t likely to ever go away, for example.

[isaacs]

Yeah, I think @ljharb is right on this one. npm is community infrastructure, and that makes it tend to accrete features and never give them up.

While it'd be lovely to presume that this change could be temporary, it's unlikely to remain temporary once it's in use. If it works, people will use it, and then making it not work will break their workflow. Better to stick with the future-proof approach from day one. The long-term costs of removing it later outweigh the short-term benefits of faster uptake today.