I think you misinterpreted the comment. The Payment would be required for people wanting to PUSH to pypi. Developers and people PULLING from pypi would remain free. The problem is garbage and malicious submissions.
I don't think the comment you're replying to misunderstood the comment. I think the author was saying that they would update the readme of their projects (which they _push_ to a registry, and for which they do not want to pay) to instruct people to pull the package from somewhere else.
You can do that, but it certainly doesn’t help you with project discovery. If you want only distribute via GitHub that’s fine. But as a developer I’d need a compelling reason to use such a project vs one distributed via pypi
That's ok. Many projects don't care about discovery. (As in being popular/brand name, rather than being possible to find if someone needs that specific thing) And even those that do can rely on people searching for "python package for frobnicating" and finding it somewhere else.
I'm publishing my code for the benefit of others, not mine, so if someone writes the same thing and pays to get it published, that's fine with me.
> I’d need a compelling reason to use such a project vs one distributed via pypi
Apart from trivial projects, there's not that many alternatives you can swap out. Your choices may be "use such project or write your own".
Tbh, changing PyPi urls to git urls at GitHub would almost be a win-win. At least GitHub has namespaces and many other indicators of trust, such as issue tracker, stars, git log and so on. You would loose semver however.
Usually checking the official GitHub projects readme for exact name of pip install command is what I normally do anyway. I would never ever use PyPi as a discovery mechanism, it has too many typosquatters and other lookalikes.
