Nobody pays for open source. We can force them to.
Nobody pays for FOSS, we can force them to
Open source is caught in an evolutionarily stable strategy: free software wins users, closed software wins profits, and the free layer runs on maintainer burnout. Tips, foundations, corporate charity, and government funds have all failed to change the equilibrium. The real shift is velocity—software became critical faster than institutions could notice. The solution isn't to stop writing free code, but to force the beneficiaries to pay.
The problem isn't that people write software for free. It's that we've arranged things so the people who write the most useful software for free get a second unpaid job as a reward.
- otterley
If you want people to pay you for your software, stop writing it for free. Conversely, if you write it for free, don't expect people to pay you for it. Otherwise you are no better than someone at an intersection with a bottle of Windex and a squeegee who, unsolicited, cleans a windshield and then demands the driver to pay for it.
The original authors of Free Software and open source were career academics and others who were paid to do other things, or were sponsored by scientific and defense research grants. I don't know how anyone got the nutty idea that you could make money on FOSS itself. Practically every time someone has tried to make money on FOSS it has failed.
(Edit: this comment previously ended with "...from Netscape on down.")
- haunter
I'm not sure it fits the free and/or libre software philosophy but I'm a big fan of releasing otherwise free and open source software as a paid version and with some exclusive QoL features in proprietary store fronts.
For example Krita. https://krita.org/en/download/ FOSS but you can buy it on Steam, Microsoft Store, Epic Store, and Apple Store. You get one exclusive feature, automatic updates (and more recently Steam Cloud sync support), and you also support the developers (on the other hand Valve, MS, Epic, and Apple also gets a cut too).
If you read for example the Steam reviews everyone points out that it's a free software but buying on Steam is also a good and very importantly straightforward way to support the devs + the platform itself has such a pull ("buying games you never play") that people buy it just for the case of having it in their library
- woodruffw
(Speaking only for myself.)
Having open indices charge money is the “easy” part, relatively speaking. The author is correct that most companies will grumble a bit and then fork over the nominal amount of money needed to preserve their existing assumptions.
I think the rest of this don’t really work in practice though: it’s actually incredibly hard to distribute money to open source maintainers across hundreds of jurisdictions, and it’s not immediately obvious how a service like PyPI (which is barely funded to maintain and sustain itself) would shoulder such a burden without diverting a very large fraction of that money for things that would make people upset (read: lawyers and tax professionals).
(NPM would appear to be the exception to this since it has - at least on paper - the legal resources of Microsoft behind it. But I think it’s largely a quirk of history that the JavaScript packaging ecosystem ended up with a single corporate owner, and no ecosystem I’ve worked with seems eager to pursue a similar relationship.)
- dwedge
> Now, finally, I have an idea. It's gonna take 5000 words to get there, though, so if you don't have that kind of time, skip to the part about registries.
This article is full of LLMisms, which is to be expected but maybe it wouldn't be 5000 words and wouldn't need this disclaimer if they wrote it themselves
- ajnin
Glossing over that too long article, the main proposition seems to be :
> The registries should charge companies, and pay maintainers
They already centralize packages, centralizing money flows is bound to cause more issues. By the way, npm is owned by GitHub, and GitHub is owned by Microsoft. "Your payment for your leftpad package has been transferred to your Microsoft Wallet". No thanks.
I just think there's a fundamental disconnect between the goals here. If I write free software, I don't write it to get paid, I write it to benefit others. If someone takes my work without also contributing back, I will get upset. The solution is not to give me money, that's not the spirit. We should not force people to pay for OSS but we should force them to give back to the community.
That's why copyleft licences like GPL are superior. People licence their work under BSD-style licences that are the equivalent of putting a box of stuff on the side of the road with a "free, help yourself" sign and then get upset when people do. BSD-style licences take away as many rights from users and authors as they can. GPL-style licences give as many rights to the users as they can. That's basically completely opposite philosophies. Use the right licence folks.
- mentalgear
I feel like the main issue with projects switching between a permissive and less permissive license and back is that starting out as fully permissive in the first place was the main error.
If everybody would just agree to start their open source code as something like source-available or OpenRAIL -requiring companies with more than $5M in annual revenue to pay for the work - we wouldn't be in this situation.
- neiltalap
He confuses developer adoption with cloud infrastructure maintenance, and he fundamentally misreads what software maintainers actually want.
The forking tax is great, and it requires a permissible checkpoint in the repo, which might not be available at all if you start correctly. Then the forks they use are quite literally "theirs", people don't trust hyperscalers.
Companies like redhat, jfrog, etc. have a model that is different to what one would want. They are built not on excellence but rather on taking the indemnity clauses on themselves. Hiring people to have 24/7 rotations and support, and all this Jazz and overhead that has nothing to do with being an expert at your thing.
Registry cron job paying thing...
Highly flawed and lacks fundamental understanding of the world, business, economics, and, more importantly, the actual drivers of the behaviour of the hyperscalers and business models of high-tech companies.
They conveniently forget that they were the very first ones to do MIT, then they build a community, just to later rug-pull everybody with non-permissive licenses. Plenty of examples of companies thriving by doing proper licensing from the very get-go. And these very people lacking in ethics then go on to complain THE LOUDEST that hyperscalers are forking them. I can't fathom the heights of entitlement and incompetence.
- schneems
Some pedantic points:
> Ruby Central, whose dependence on one big sponsor then produced the 2025 takeover
Ruby Central had two major sponsors at the time: Alpha Omega and Shopify. Also the events had much more to do with interpersonal conflicts than sponsors.
My report: https://rubycentral.org/news/rubygems-fracture-incident-repo...
That is the GitHub only portion, but the AWS root happened immediately after/during and has its own timeline https://rubycentral.org/news/rubygems-org-aws-root-access-ev...
> a depleted team
The named people we lost from the report: Sam was already way out the door. Andre was most of the way. Ellen wasn't doing that operational work. Deivid was only working on bundler and not the registry. Josef is the main operational loss, he removed himself. I'm unsure of which attack exactly Is being referenced, but Colby was promoted to full time (was planned before, just waiting on paperwork).
Other prior maintainers and security researchers did NOT leave. Maciej Mensfeld Was especially crucial. Jenny Shen. To name a few. These people are “the maintainers” too. We’ve (I’m a volunteer, came on in October 2025) brought on a number of in-kind engineers as well (companies donating engineer hours via letting employees work on company time).
I reached out to everyone unnamed that lost GitHub access. Of them, one asked for admin back (granted). None were active in operations.
Seldo’s overall point: about the fragility of all of this still stands. But I also believe […]