Open source software is free to take is a practical measure as much as anything. It's because having the left-pad package surrounded by a paywall would suck, an

Open source software is free to take is a practical measure as much as anything. It's because having the left-pad package surrounded by a paywall would suck, and would create all kinds of weird incentives to mess with both the software and the ecosystem. And we absolutely want an ecosystem where one person makes left-pad, and someone else builds on top of that and in the end you have React, or whatever, and that doesn't work if everything is an app store. We (programmers) need to explain this to the money people somehow. No company I've worked for in my 10-year career would have been able to exist without open source. They would have had no product. If you're extracting significant value from this ecosystem, you should help fund it, even though there isn't a toll booth on the way in.