6 ms·

Nobody pays for FOSS, we can force them to

190 points by Muhammad523 5d ago

luqtas 5d ago
after reading Ford Foundation document [0] i'll go beyond and purpose FOSS not only limit commercial use but also forking [1] as it seems we have an endless stream of libraries which do the same thing, scattering even more this "fragile" ecosystem which would benefit so much of big tech's evergreen [0] https://www.fordfoundation.org/learning/library/research-reports/roads-and-bridges-the-unseen-labor-behind-our-digital-infrastructure/ https://www.fordfoundation.org/learning/library/research-rep... [1] https://happort.org/constraining_freedom https://happort.org/constraining_freedom
- aaasssdddgirl 5d ago
  Being able to fork your own version is a desirable goal and by design. The original author can and will probably not want to take his project in all kind of imaginable directions.
- gus_massa 5d ago
  That is "source available", that is a fine decition if you like it. Just don't call it FOSS.
haunter 5d ago
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/ 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 https://store.steampowered.com/app/280680/Krita https://store.steampowered.com/app/280680/Krita
- fph 5d ago
  Not a very effective way to support the devs though: only about 60% of what you pay gets to the developers, because of Steam's cut and VAT.
  - haunter 5d ago
    Yet by the active unique user numbers they have estimated sold at least ~168k copies and maybe upwards ~500k https://steamdb.info/app/280680/charts/ https://steamdb.info/app/280680/charts/ And that's Steam alone. I'd be really curious compared to this how many people click on the Donate button on the Krita homepage. That's a lot of purchases imo for a project like this. I'm kind of ambivalent about the store cuts but they give a huge enough exposure to any game or software.
- al_borland 5d ago
  Filebot used to be open source. I bought it on the AppStore, it was a way to support development and I figured it would give me easier updates that would just happen in the background. When Apple moved to ARM, the App Store version lagged behind. An ARM version was available, but not in the App Store. I assume this is because that ARM version was a separate download instead of being a universal app, and the x86 app would run on everything (for now). The app is no longer open source, and is paid. To get the ARM version (due to my stubbornness in not wanting to install Rosetta), I had to pay again just to get the app through a different means of distribution. Too many run-ins with silly issues like this can really sour a person on the “free app in a paid store” model.
  - bigyabai 5d ago
    That can happen regardless of which storefront you use to buy a free app. It's more of a developer-specific nitpick than a chronic problem with FOSS and freeware. If you're happy to sponsor the app's development, then owning the App Store version should make you feel proud. The developer is still able to make a living thanks to you, and they're offering extended support if you're unwilling to use a fork of the free version. A good example of this is Dwarf Fortress, which I have bought on Steam 3 times now so that I could gift it to two of my friends. God willing, nothing will prevent me from buying a 4th and 5th copy when Christmas rolls around.
mentalgear 5d ago
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. https://fair.io/ https://fair.io/
- tracerbulletx 5d ago
  Yeah its a bait and switch. People want the social credit, early adoption, and community embrace of being open source, but they also want a captive business model.
  - amelius 5d ago
    It's not a bait and switch because the old version of the software that was released with the old license can still be used as such. If you call this bait and switch then I suppose this means that you somehow feel entitled to future versions of the software having the same license, forever.
    - aaasssdddgirl 5d ago
      That’s the thing with software, you can automate most future updates, with LLMs and whatnot. Also, the initial software probably didn’t have a lot of known cves when it was sold.
- rpdillon 5d ago
  They won't do this, because starting out as non-free doesn't get the same traction. Now that I think about it, it's basically a form of enshitification: draw people in with one deal, then after they're onboard, change it to something less favorable.
  - amelius 5d ago
    Why is it enshittification if you only have to pay when you have >$5M in revenue? Is your world so shit if you cross that threshold?
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majorchord 5d ago
The usual pushback I get from FOSS zealots is that any time I mention things like money, popularity, increasing adoption etc. they just say none of that matters because it's "not a project goal." In fact, often they don't even want money to be a thing at all, they think capitalism is inherently evil (cough innovation) and would prefer if everyone was just poor and lived in the woods or something. Sorry... I like the world to be a little more interesting than that.
- rpdillon 5d ago
  > money, popularity, increasing adoption These are the currencies of the VC world, and many open source developers don't release their work for those reasons (myself included, limited though my contributions are). It seems strange to deride them as making the world uninteresting because of this.
- johnnyanmac 5d ago
  >they think capitalism is inherently evil Modern society has done a wonderful job proving that sentiment right. I can't blame them. >would prefer if everyone was just poor and lived in the woods or something. I'd prefer if everyone had proper control over the tools they used. Whether they choose to live in the woods to use such tools or use them to make society a worse place is the double edged of 'free' (as in freedom) I completely understand those skeptical about perverse incentives from not making software 'free' (as in beer). It shouldn't be a surprise that adding monetary inventice changes the entire incentive structure.
- philipwhiuk 5d ago
  The financialisation of everything is, frankly, fairly toxic, so it's reasonable argument.
  - fragmede 5d ago
    Call it names all you want, under capitalism, we all need money to pay for food and rent and it's got to come from somewhere.
- 5d ago
dwedge 5d ago
> 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
- mixologic 5d ago
  The only llmism I sensed is the use of "load bearing". Im usually queasy after reading llm slop, and stop before the end. This didn't have that effect. Maybe the llms are getting better, but either way, this article reads like a real hunan write the whole thing.
  - Bolwin 5d ago
    This article feels like it was written by a human who has just read to much llm writing
    - logicallee 5d ago
      Humans don't write things like: "Now, the popular way to tell this story is "the system is breaking," and I don't think that's right, and the distinction matters."
      - aidenn0 5d ago
        This statement just makes me think of a line from The Diamond Age in which two kids in a post-nanotech future first see a scrap of hand-woven cloth and after thinking decide that it must have been made by nanomachines because no human could make something so regular.
  - magarnicle 5d ago
    It felt like unedited, unstyled Claude output. e.g. "No, and the difference is the important bit."
  - singpolyma3 5d ago
gus_massa 5d ago
Isn't this similar to the anaconda model? (Except they keep the money instead of distributing it.) Depending on how you count, in my research group we are like 10 and in my whoooole university we are like 60.000 employees. When they went from free to restriced for big organizations I just uninstaled it.
- toyg 5d ago
  Yes, but anaconda has a free competitor (pypi). If pypi started charging too, you'd have nowhere else to go.
rootedbox 5d ago
You seem to be forgetting the most important word in FOSS..
- amelius 5d ago
  For them it is not the most important word, apparently.
  - aaasssdddgirl 5d ago
    But it is one of the words.
    - amelius 5d ago
      It can still be free for most people but paid for companies who make >$5M revenue. Conditionally free is also free.
- mixologic 5d ago
  The Free in Foss is not "Free as in beer".
  - bigstrat2003 5d ago
    No, but "free as in speech" effectively precludes making money from sales of the software. As soon as you sell it to one person, that person can give it to others for less than he paid you (all the way down to free), so nobody has a reason to pay you any more. There's a reason FOSS survives on donations or service, rather than selling copies of the software.
- illright 5d ago
  The software still remains free, it's the registry that would become a paid service under such a model, that's what was proposed in the article. And even then, the registry would remain free for individuals, so it would merely be a price of convenience
cocodill 5d ago
I think I'm starting to forget, but could someone maybe tell me what the F in FOSS stands for?
- mrob 5d ago
  "Free as in speech, not free as in beer." I'm not reading an AI slop article, but there's nothing in either the Free Software Definition or the Open Source Definition restricting the selling of software. It does prevent you from restricting people from sharing that software once they've bought it, but you could always use a threshold pledge system to ensure you get enough money before releasing anything: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_pledge_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_pledge_system
  - cocodill 5d ago
    > "Free as in speech, not free as in beer." As I understand it, if you have the first, the second follows from it. So it's effectively the same.
    - mrob 5d ago
      Not the same at all. Free as in beer means you get nothing. Free as in speech allows you to get as much money as you can using a threshold pledge system. This isn't just theoretical: the famous 3D modelling software Blender was released this way, becoming Free Software only after a €100,000 payment.
      - cocodill 5d ago
        Sorry, I phrased it badly. I meant that in practice free-as-in-speech implies free-as-in-beer for copies: once anyone can redistribute the code.
- wmf 5d ago
  "We encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. ... So if you are redistributing copies of free software, you might as well charge a substantial fee and make some money. Redistributing free software is a good and legitimate activity; if you do it, you might as well make a profit from it. ... Distributing free software is an opportunity to raise funds for development. Don't waste it!" https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
imoverclocked 5d ago
The reason I dislike this is because of the game it creates. Let's say we have someone who developed a small, well-used dependency (say: xz) but there is now incentive to be "in the dependency chain." xz is open, LLMs are really good at stealing/recreating; what stops someone from publishing rxz (maybe a rust port, maybe a gnu-r port, maybe it's "Really fast" xz, maybe it's just hoping for a typo in a registry.) This new dependency adds very little over the original xz and xz could have just used a simple PR. On the other side of things, does accepting a PR from someone grant the author the ability to collect royalties for that software project? If so, how would you quantify that? LOC seems like a quick but really bad answer for what it is incentivizing. For many, the entire point of "F" in "FOSS" is not getting tangled up in this kind of mess. I personally would never want to add "am I opening myself up to a lawsuit if I don't pay someone for their PR" to enter my calculus of accepting a PR. Especially if this is because I reject payment at all on a project. Finally, if a company/employee submits code to FOSS under this model, do they now expect a return?
- wmf 5d ago
  This new dependency adds very little over the original xz and xz could have just used a simple PR. I kind of like the incentives created by this competition. This "what if someone takes your software, adds one feature, and sells it" argument has been made many times and I think the answer is that you, as the original maintainer, are in the best position to add features and if you squander that position you deserve to lose.
  - tEem21 5d ago
    Seriously imagine the consequences of this "eat or be eaten" approach. What it incentivizes is not feature development per se, but fragmentation for the sake of it. This in turn leads to less attentation toward maintaining the shared base of the fragmented forks, as it has been superseded with features X and Y in different, probably incompatible forks.
    - wmf 5d ago
      My point is that the original maintainer can defuse the forks by including the same features. That leaves users no reason to bother using the forks.
erelong 5d ago
how about making money from something else like hardware, to fund software (almost like IP is a fiction and people should be making money from tangible things rather than info) I'm sure AI can also brainstorm more ideas for (F)OSS business models today
otterley 5d ago
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.")
- singpolyma3 5d ago
  In what world was Netscape a failure? Made some people an awful lot of money and then gave us Firefox... Pretty far from failure
  - nnutter 5d ago
    Netscape basically died and was replaced by Firefox which doesn't/can't effectively charge users for the software so instead makes money by selling default search engine, etc. Netscape existed as the internet was coming into existence. You used to have to buy a physical copy in the store to install it. People barely knew how to use their computers so the activation cost for bypassing their "pay wall" was high enough.
    - SoftTalker 5d ago
      Netscape was included free with almost every ISP installation disk.
    - toast0 5d ago
      Netscape lost the ability to charge before it went open source. Among other things, Microsoft released internet explorer for free (part of embrace, extend, extinguish, afaik). The open sourcing of Netscape 5.0 happened in early 1998, and AOL purchased Netscape later that year. Firebird/Firefox came a few years later.
highway900 5d ago
The lions share of the packages used by company X should get the lions share of their subscription too. This is where music subscription has failed.
jefftk 5d ago
> The evolutionarily stable strategy for a piece of software is "anybody may use this for anything, including commercially, for free." That's MIT, BSD, Apache, the licenses that ask for nothing. Every project that has tried to be a slightly less generous dove has lost to a project that stayed a full dove Linux (GPLv2) seems like an obvious counterexample?
- toyg 5d ago
  Arguably that happened because Linux was, in fact, the most generous option: the BSDs effectively refused to get contributors beyond their very small groups, and refused to incorporate patches to support "bad" hardware or nonfree blobs - meanwhile, Linux was built around modules that could contain anything regardless of license, and happily accepted new patches and unknown maintainers. You still see it today: Linux literally built its own distributed VCS (git), while some BSDs are still on the hyper-centralized CVS. If there isn't an even more generous option is simply because building a mainstream OS is incredibly hard.
  - jefftk 5d ago
    How open a platform is to external contributors is a very different axis than the legal permissiveness one the article describes.
    - toyg 5d ago
      It's the same axis: business-friendliness. The legal permissiveness described is critical for most software because it enables business adoption. But for a kernel, which sits at the intersection of hardware and software, "free as in beer" is not enough, there is another critical factor: how easy it is to make it work with proprietary hardware. A free kernel that won't work with my custom chip and whose maintainers won't accept the necessary patches to fix this state of things, is just useless to my business.
nekusar 5d ago
Change the GPL and make the GPL only apply to NATURAL HUMANS and NOT CORPORATE HUMANS. If the corporates want to use it, they can make a licensing agreement and put money into a trust of all who support it. They don't want to pay? Too fucking bad.
- HeyLaughingBoy 5d ago
  Or, you know, just use a different license?
Almondsetat 5d ago
Other than charity and donations, the only two ways of getting paid for developing FOSS are: 1) support contracts and 2) crowdfunding the next release. Digital goods live in a post-scarsity situation. Applying the same business model as real life products is crazy and it's the reason why we have Adobe&Co.
mw888 5d ago
I'm not convinced a problem is actually here. I certainly wouldn't believe LLMs, an optional tool, make any part of this fundamentally worse. Maybe superficially for people who can't adapt.
JohnHaugeland 5d ago
“we can force them to pay for free”
montroser 5d ago
Hard pass, thanks. Just, don't expect to get paid for maintaining open source projects. It's easy. Everyone knows the deal going in, and if somehow you missed that you're not going to get paid for this and you want out at any time -- you just stop. If you made something of value someone else who cares enough will pick it up. Or it can languish and the earth will keep spinning. It's fine.
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schneems 5d ago
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-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-event-september-2025/ 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 the details and the nuance matter. I reached out to Laurie on bsky when this was first published but didn’t hear back.
- schneems 5d ago
  Cannot edit to add: I left off Martin accidentally. Not intentionally. I don't actually know how involved he was with operations recently (he was a former acting OSS director for a short period a long while ago).
heelix 5d ago
One of the easiest ways to get paid for something is to to offer commercial support once something shifts to 'end of life' for community support. Can't get off of an old busted version - write a check for continued support! This sort of thing is reasonably easy to get through the accounting process. Leaving a tip, paying for something free, trying to send money to a group that our infrastructure absolutely relies on - stupid hard. Commercial support, on the other hand, is very understandable to the bean counters.
yding 5d ago
Great proposal Laurie! It'd be great if YC would set up an Open Source endowment also, with say 0.5% of their companies' stock (voluntarily) endowed to open source software.
antipaul 5d ago
Nobody pays for free (& open source) software?
illright 5d ago
I think it's a great idea and I hope someone inside the teams of popular registries sees this and they actually give it a go. I imagine the shitstorm of reactions that it's gonna cause from people who aren't even included in the "required to pay" group and I wish the registry maintainers strength to get through this
jhack 5d ago
FOSS == Free Open Source Software, fyi.
0xbadcafebee 5d ago
Honestly, the privilege and entitlement of some people. You made a thing, you did a lot of work, you gave it away for free. Nobody stole it from you. Nobody even asked you to make it. You created this situation yourself. And now you're upset that nobody paid you for the thing you make for free? "But but but... companies are making money... off the thing... that I gave them for free!! How dare they!! There is no way I could have seen this coming!!" - Either you were ignorant and didn't realize people would sell the thing you gave away, or you knew about it and are now pretending to be outraged at the thing you knew was going to happen. "But but but... they should pay me anyway, because they're profiting off my labor! It's what's fair!!" - What's fair is for someone to take you at your (and your software license's) word, to do exactly what you told them they could do (profit off it). What's not fair is to turn around after they're hooked on your free thing, and try to force them to pay you for it, after the fact. The point of open source is only to open up the source code, allow people to contribute, collaborate, and share. If you want to get paid for it too, don't put an open source license on it. It's that simple. Add whatever terms you want. But don't make FOSS and then later say it's unfair for people to do exactly what your license said they could do.
- JacobKfromIRC 5d ago
  Despite the submission title, I don't think I would call this proposal a way to force companies to pay for free software. They could choose not to pay if they don't want to use the software. If they've already downloaded the software, then they wouldn't need to pay unless they want to download it again, but they are free to make as many copies as they want so re-downloading is mostly going to be a matter of convenience I think. I believe free software is better than proprietary software, so I think it's good to better incentivize the production and maintenance of free software.
  - 0xbadcafebee 5d ago
    Using nicer language doesn't change the argument. You're still suggesting that corporations be required to pay for the software, which is a reversal of the terms of the license. Let's ignore for the moment that this is manipulative behavior (switching from free to paid after the fact, the same thing users complain about corporations doing). This is likely also illegal. The software license is a contract. Permissive FOSS licenses grant the use of the software in current and future forms without payment. To withhold the source code until receiving payment would be a violation of the contract terms. All of the copyright holders would have to agree to change the license to no longer be Open Source, and even then a judge may well find it illegal. It's also a bad idea because it would split the community. I find this action so unethical that I would no longer contribute to or use any FOSS that required payment. I didn't get into this community to shake companies down for cash. If you want to make money off software, go do that somewhere else, or do it with services and support.
j2kun 5d ago
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blastingrock 5d ago
Why would you write such an important article with AI? I can't share this with people I know because they will lose trust if I send them AI articles. It's really, very easy to tell because it's filled with AI rhetoric and you don't sound like this in your writing from 2020 and before
neiltalap 5d ago
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.
3stacks 5d ago
I don't understand why anyone takes this person seriously. He fell ass-backwards into a prominent company, got demoted after proving incapable of being the CTO, and then seemingly got promptly off-boarded after the acquisition and now just has a developer relations job. Not to denigrate that role, but it doesn't exactly confer authority for this to be the trajectory of your career.
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morninglight 5d ago
Our school system has been using FOSS products for years. In effect, it is a donation to a non-profit organization. However, I'm not aware of any of the creators reaping a tax deduction for their donation. Donating a used car to a non-profit has a well established path to this end. Are any FOSS authors using a similar method to attain some payback?
Grimeton 5d ago
There is nothing free in Android.
jamienk 5d ago
This is very interesting: it is a lot like the GLP (pun intended) solution: it doesn't try to "cure" the symptom, it just piggybacks onto the existing facts-on-the-ground and tries to make things better from there. I'm not totally sure I understand the "distribution/registries" thing though? This also related to GitHub and HF, right? And Netflix. (You mentioned Spotify.) How they host stuff and then leverage that position to build add-ons and lock-in, lobby for laws. Companies PAY for this "bandwidth." I always thought that BitTorrent would eventually take off and make these kinds of sites irrelevant, that it would democratize bandwidth, the last leg of the battle for universal accessibility. I like your idea. I wish you luck.
woodruffw 5d ago
(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.)
- jongjong 5d ago
  This is why I just advocate for UBI nowadays. It's impossible for certain people to get paid for work they do and value they create and the reasons are numerous and different for every single person. A lot of it is because human attention has been fully centralized and monopolized. Regulations are the nail in the coffin. This industry is cooked, to a crisp. Tech people who have been excluded from the tech markets should be paid some kind of compensation.
  - woodruffw 5d ago
    I think Alex Gaynor is essentially right here[1]. [1]: https://alexgaynor.net/2025/apr/08/putting-a-price-tag-on-open-source/ https://alexgaynor.net/2025/apr/08/putting-a-price-tag-on-op...
    - jongjong 5d ago
      The first time I understood there is a systemic problem was years ago when I started attending investor events and was pitching my open source software to tech companies and investors and they were all asking me "But what are you selling?" and I kept telling them "I'm not selling anything, I'm just looking for adopters of my open source product." and I was shaking hands with every person in the room. They couldn't understand. They must have thought I was crazy. But the thing is, I couldn't even sell it for free. Even though it was provably useful and many similar companies did use my product successfully, at scale. It really felt like "It's a big club and you ain't in it." It was like; they couldn't believe how much work I was putting in to give away a product for free. I think it might have made some people uncomfortable even. And although I am more honest and cynical now about my own intentions, I still think that 'making money' was not and is not the primary goal; it was always a secondary goal which I planned to attend to later if/when the conditions would be right. I was literally just trying to get big companies to adopt so that other smaller companies would look at them and tell themselves "Look, it's OK, big company X is using the product, so I can use it too!" My goal was not to sell anything, it was to dismantle systemic taboos which worked against me as a small contributor. 10 years later, the taboos are worse than before! I don't know how anyone can start an open source project without the badge of corporate sponsorship these days.
MiroslavPokorny 5d ago
Its the same reason why the people who do the actual hard and deadly work get paid the least. This is true EVERYWHERE.
adrianN 5d ago
Software stacks are infrastructure. It makes sense to pay for infrastructure via taxes. That's why "Public Money, Public Code" is imho a great initiative. We should redirect the public money that we currently hand over to proprietary software vendors towards open source.
darylteo 5d ago
This immediately falls apart when you realise that the registry is also a company that doesn't pay for FOSS and does not have the competitive incentives to ever do so.
BubbleRings 5d ago
Am I missing something, or are most of the comments here not really addressing the pros and cons and possibilities in OP’s proposal?
ajnin 5d ago
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.
jongjong 5d ago
> They sell insurance against the maintainer, when the maintainer is the one person in the chain who can actually make the code more secure, and she gets nothing while a company two layers up gets paid to tell you whether she did. Damn, this is a really good line. It's the reason why existing tools like Snyk give so many false positives and miss so many actual vulnerabilities. They're kind of useless really. They create false comfort and busy-work for staff whilst providing a ready-made "Snyk said it was secure" narrative to cover everyone's asses when things inevitably go belly-up. And Snyk be like "We responded as fast as possible, so we fulfilled our part" yet what really counts is not even in the equation. Personally, I stopped contributing my code open source. I still write it and I've built a major project I'd love to make public but I'm keeping it for myself. I'm waiting for communism or UBI to arrive, then I may resume publishing as open source. If it takes too long, I will pass it down to my son and he will wait until communism arrives to make it public.
nocturndev55 5d ago
[flagged]
jongjong 5d ago
I'm kind of disturbed that it took me 7 years to find out about the Feross incident: https://feross.org/funding-experiment-recap/ https://feross.org/funding-experiment-recap/ This guy is literally a high profile individual from my own niche Node.js open source community and I'm literally an open source developer from that exact same community and I had no idea.
aidenn0 5d ago
> Because there are two games going on, and they have different winners. In the code game the resource is the software itself, and free wins every time, because anybody can copy code, so any attempt to charge for it invites a copy that doesn't. In the supply game the resource is not having to think about where the code comes from, and that game is won by whoever is the default. This is, IMO misdiagnosing what's going on. Spending money is always friction. The number of ICs that can spend 4 figures of company money on a whim is much smaller than the number of ICs that can download libre software on a whim. Then once the company knows they are using the libre software and it adds value, people who can spend large sums of company money will want to do so to protect that value.
SamInTheShell 5d ago
MongoDB and Grafana seem to be doing fine. Idk that this logic holds up at face value. Like the HashiCorp, Elastic, and MinIO license changes pissed people because it was a rug pull on the community of people supporting and consuming those projects. If they had started as AGPL licensed and took the Mongo and Grafana approach, who knows what things would look like today.
necovek 5d ago
This is a great proposal, but other than the gamification worry, I wonder if it also changes the contribution model? Eg. how motivated are you to contribute an important set of fixes to an upstream package knowing that this package is getting lots of money for the maintainer, and would not get any for you? Would you instead fork hoping to get everybody to switch over to your fork (it could even be justified: "for quicker availability of fixes, here's my fork"), and then ride it out? Certainly not everybody would approach it that way, but I am certain some would. Others might not even want to contribute and would instead just file a bug expecting the maintainer to fix it (they are getting paid 30k a month by PyPI, they might as well fix it). Basically, whenever money enters the picture, the core dynamics change, and it'd hold especially so for FOSS.
nirui 5d ago
Depends on what you're doing, the "source-available" model may not work. Because many software earns their money through just few tricks, maybe it's more user-friendly design, maybe it's better predictive algorithm etc. These tricks hidden deep in the logic so it's hard for the competitors to figure out in months time. But if you made the source code available, the trick will be reveled in plan sight and you lose advantage quickly. After that, you turned software making a laborer's game (you need add laborer to add and/or steal ideas faster than your competitors), it's way less fun. If you want to make money, you have to play the art of balance. How much do you want to make open, and how much advantage you want to withhold.
Ekaros 5d ago
I have always wondered about most common tools. How much should maintainer of say bash be paid per install? Or per use? Or per month a system runs? What about all other core tools or common tools? Even most of things in say Linux? Surely those are much more important and more deserving than any service or whatever you run on them? You can't install that software without them. Or does these payments end somewhere? So money does not end up with those who wrote and now maintain them?
kelnos 5d ago
Why would this be implemented, though? The author talks about how companies don't pay OSS maintainers because they don't have to. But they often pay registry maintainers because they do have to (or they have to run their own, which they don't want to, so they pay). But why would the registry set up a system to pay maintainers? They don't have to, so why give up a part of their revenue stream? Either the registry's aims are profit, and they wouldn't want to do that, or their goal is to charge for operating costs to keep the lights on, and they wouldn't have the spare revenue to pay maintainers. The bottom line is the same: if someone has to pay for something, and there are no alternatives (or the alternatives are costly in other ways), then they will pay. If they don't have to pay, then they won't. If registries get developers to upload their code without paying them to do so, why would they voluntarily pay them?

190 points by Muhammad523 5d ago

after reading Ford Foundation document [0] i'll go beyond and purpose FOSS not only limit commercial use but also forking [1] as it seems we have an endless stream of libraries which do the same thing, scattering even more this "fragile" ecosystem which would benefit so much of big tech's evergreen [0] https://www.fordfoundation.org/learning/library/research-reports/roads-and-bridges-the-unseen-labor-behind-our-digital-infrastructure/ https://www.fordfoundation.org/learning/library/research-rep... [1] https://happort.org/constraining_freedom https://happort.org/constraining_freedom

aaasssdddgirl 5d ago
Being able to fork your own version is a desirable goal and by design. The original author can and will probably not want to take his project in all kind of imaginable directions.
gus_massa 5d ago
That is "source available", that is a fine decition if you like it. Just don't call it FOSS.

haunter 5d ago

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/ 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 https://store.steampowered.com/app/280680/Krita https://store.steampowered.com/app/280680/Krita

fph 5d ago
Not a very effective way to support the devs though: only about 60% of what you pay gets to the developers, because of Steam's cut and VAT.
- haunter 5d ago
  Yet by the active unique user numbers they have estimated sold at least ~168k copies and maybe upwards ~500k https://steamdb.info/app/280680/charts/ https://steamdb.info/app/280680/charts/ And that's Steam alone. I'd be really curious compared to this how many people click on the Donate button on the Krita homepage. That's a lot of purchases imo for a project like this. I'm kind of ambivalent about the store cuts but they give a huge enough exposure to any game or software.
al_borland 5d ago
Filebot used to be open source. I bought it on the AppStore, it was a way to support development and I figured it would give me easier updates that would just happen in the background. When Apple moved to ARM, the App Store version lagged behind. An ARM version was available, but not in the App Store. I assume this is because that ARM version was a separate download instead of being a universal app, and the x86 app would run on everything (for now). The app is no longer open source, and is paid. To get the ARM version (due to my stubbornness in not wanting to install Rosetta), I had to pay again just to get the app through a different means of distribution. Too many run-ins with silly issues like this can really sour a person on the “free app in a paid store” model.
- bigyabai 5d ago
  That can happen regardless of which storefront you use to buy a free app. It's more of a developer-specific nitpick than a chronic problem with FOSS and freeware. If you're happy to sponsor the app's development, then owning the App Store version should make you feel proud. The developer is still able to make a living thanks to you, and they're offering extended support if you're unwilling to use a fork of the free version. A good example of this is Dwarf Fortress, which I have bought on Steam 3 times now so that I could gift it to two of my friends. God willing, nothing will prevent me from buying a 4th and 5th copy when Christmas rolls around.

mentalgear 5d ago

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. https://fair.io/ https://fair.io/

tracerbulletx 5d ago
Yeah its a bait and switch. People want the social credit, early adoption, and community embrace of being open source, but they also want a captive business model.
- amelius 5d ago
  It's not a bait and switch because the old version of the software that was released with the old license can still be used as such. If you call this bait and switch then I suppose this means that you somehow feel entitled to future versions of the software having the same license, forever.
  - aaasssdddgirl 5d ago
    That’s the thing with software, you can automate most future updates, with LLMs and whatnot. Also, the initial software probably didn’t have a lot of known cves when it was sold.
rpdillon 5d ago
They won't do this, because starting out as non-free doesn't get the same traction. Now that I think about it, it's basically a form of enshitification: draw people in with one deal, then after they're onboard, change it to something less favorable.
- amelius 5d ago
  Why is it enshittification if you only have to pay when you have >$5M in revenue? Is your world so shit if you cross that threshold?

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majorchord 5d ago

The usual pushback I get from FOSS zealots is that any time I mention things like money, popularity, increasing adoption etc. they just say none of that matters because it's "not a project goal." In fact, often they don't even want money to be a thing at all, they think capitalism is inherently evil (cough innovation) and would prefer if everyone was just poor and lived in the woods or something. Sorry... I like the world to be a little more interesting than that.

rpdillon 5d ago
> money, popularity, increasing adoption These are the currencies of the VC world, and many open source developers don't release their work for those reasons (myself included, limited though my contributions are). It seems strange to deride them as making the world uninteresting because of this.
johnnyanmac 5d ago
>they think capitalism is inherently evil Modern society has done a wonderful job proving that sentiment right. I can't blame them. >would prefer if everyone was just poor and lived in the woods or something. I'd prefer if everyone had proper control over the tools they used. Whether they choose to live in the woods to use such tools or use them to make society a worse place is the double edged of 'free' (as in freedom) I completely understand those skeptical about perverse incentives from not making software 'free' (as in beer). It shouldn't be a surprise that adding monetary inventice changes the entire incentive structure.
philipwhiuk 5d ago
The financialisation of everything is, frankly, fairly toxic, so it's reasonable argument.
- fragmede 5d ago
  Call it names all you want, under capitalism, we all need money to pay for food and rent and it's got to come from somewhere.
5d ago

dwedge 5d ago

> 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

mixologic 5d ago
The only llmism I sensed is the use of "load bearing". Im usually queasy after reading llm slop, and stop before the end. This didn't have that effect. Maybe the llms are getting better, but either way, this article reads like a real hunan write the whole thing.
- Bolwin 5d ago
  This article feels like it was written by a human who has just read to much llm writing
  - logicallee 5d ago
    Humans don't write things like: "Now, the popular way to tell this story is "the system is breaking," and I don't think that's right, and the distinction matters."
    - aidenn0 5d ago
      This statement just makes me think of a line from The Diamond Age in which two kids in a post-nanotech future first see a scrap of hand-woven cloth and after thinking decide that it must have been made by nanomachines because no human could make something so regular.
- magarnicle 5d ago
  It felt like unedited, unstyled Claude output. e.g. "No, and the difference is the important bit."
- singpolyma3 5d ago

gus_massa 5d ago

Isn't this similar to the anaconda model? (Except they keep the money instead of distributing it.) Depending on how you count, in my research group we are like 10 and in my whoooole university we are like 60.000 employees. When they went from free to restriced for big organizations I just uninstaled it.

toyg 5d ago
Yes, but anaconda has a free competitor (pypi). If pypi started charging too, you'd have nowhere else to go.

rootedbox 5d ago

You seem to be forgetting the most important word in FOSS..

amelius 5d ago
For them it is not the most important word, apparently.
- aaasssdddgirl 5d ago
  But it is one of the words.
  - amelius 5d ago
    It can still be free for most people but paid for companies who make >$5M revenue. Conditionally free is also free.
mixologic 5d ago
The Free in Foss is not "Free as in beer".
- bigstrat2003 5d ago
  No, but "free as in speech" effectively precludes making money from sales of the software. As soon as you sell it to one person, that person can give it to others for less than he paid you (all the way down to free), so nobody has a reason to pay you any more. There's a reason FOSS survives on donations or service, rather than selling copies of the software.
illright 5d ago
The software still remains free, it's the registry that would become a paid service under such a model, that's what was proposed in the article. And even then, the registry would remain free for individuals, so it would merely be a price of convenience

cocodill 5d ago

I think I'm starting to forget, but could someone maybe tell me what the F in FOSS stands for?

mrob 5d ago
"Free as in speech, not free as in beer." I'm not reading an AI slop article, but there's nothing in either the Free Software Definition or the Open Source Definition restricting the selling of software. It does prevent you from restricting people from sharing that software once they've bought it, but you could always use a threshold pledge system to ensure you get enough money before releasing anything: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_pledge_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_pledge_system
- cocodill 5d ago
  > "Free as in speech, not free as in beer." As I understand it, if you have the first, the second follows from it. So it's effectively the same.
  - mrob 5d ago
    Not the same at all. Free as in beer means you get nothing. Free as in speech allows you to get as much money as you can using a threshold pledge system. This isn't just theoretical: the famous 3D modelling software Blender was released this way, becoming Free Software only after a €100,000 payment.
    - cocodill 5d ago
      Sorry, I phrased it badly. I meant that in practice free-as-in-speech implies free-as-in-beer for copies: once anyone can redistribute the code.
wmf 5d ago
"We encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. ... So if you are redistributing copies of free software, you might as well charge a substantial fee and make some money. Redistributing free software is a good and legitimate activity; if you do it, you might as well make a profit from it. ... Distributing free software is an opportunity to raise funds for development. Don't waste it!" https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html

imoverclocked 5d ago

The reason I dislike this is because of the game it creates. Let's say we have someone who developed a small, well-used dependency (say: xz) but there is now incentive to be "in the dependency chain." xz is open, LLMs are really good at stealing/recreating; what stops someone from publishing rxz (maybe a rust port, maybe a gnu-r port, maybe it's "Really fast" xz, maybe it's just hoping for a typo in a registry.) This new dependency adds very little over the original xz and xz could have just used a simple PR. On the other side of things, does accepting a PR from someone grant the author the ability to collect royalties for that software project? If so, how would you quantify that? LOC seems like a quick but really bad answer for what it is incentivizing. For many, the entire point of "F" in "FOSS" is not getting tangled up in this kind of mess. I personally would never want to add "am I opening myself up to a lawsuit if I don't pay someone for their PR" to enter my calculus of accepting a PR. Especially if this is because I reject payment at all on a project. Finally, if a company/employee submits code to FOSS under this model, do they now expect a return?

wmf 5d ago
This new dependency adds very little over the original xz and xz could have just used a simple PR. I kind of like the incentives created by this competition. This "what if someone takes your software, adds one feature, and sells it" argument has been made many times and I think the answer is that you, as the original maintainer, are in the best position to add features and if you squander that position you deserve to lose.
- tEem21 5d ago
  Seriously imagine the consequences of this "eat or be eaten" approach. What it incentivizes is not feature development per se, but fragmentation for the sake of it. This in turn leads to less attentation toward maintaining the shared base of the fragmented forks, as it has been superseded with features X and Y in different, probably incompatible forks.
  - wmf 5d ago
    My point is that the original maintainer can defuse the forks by including the same features. That leaves users no reason to bother using the forks.

erelong 5d ago

how about making money from something else like hardware, to fund software (almost like IP is a fiction and people should be making money from tangible things rather than info) I'm sure AI can also brainstorm more ideas for (F)OSS business models today

otterley 5d ago

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.")

singpolyma3 5d ago
In what world was Netscape a failure? Made some people an awful lot of money and then gave us Firefox... Pretty far from failure
- nnutter 5d ago
  Netscape basically died and was replaced by Firefox which doesn't/can't effectively charge users for the software so instead makes money by selling default search engine, etc. Netscape existed as the internet was coming into existence. You used to have to buy a physical copy in the store to install it. People barely knew how to use their computers so the activation cost for bypassing their "pay wall" was high enough.
  - SoftTalker 5d ago
    Netscape was included free with almost every ISP installation disk.
  - toast0 5d ago
    Netscape lost the ability to charge before it went open source. Among other things, Microsoft released internet explorer for free (part of embrace, extend, extinguish, afaik). The open sourcing of Netscape 5.0 happened in early 1998, and AOL purchased Netscape later that year. Firebird/Firefox came a few years later.

highway900 5d ago

The lions share of the packages used by company X should get the lions share of their subscription too. This is where music subscription has failed.

jefftk 5d ago

> The evolutionarily stable strategy for a piece of software is "anybody may use this for anything, including commercially, for free." That's MIT, BSD, Apache, the licenses that ask for nothing. Every project that has tried to be a slightly less generous dove has lost to a project that stayed a full dove Linux (GPLv2) seems like an obvious counterexample?

toyg 5d ago
Arguably that happened because Linux was, in fact, the most generous option: the BSDs effectively refused to get contributors beyond their very small groups, and refused to incorporate patches to support "bad" hardware or nonfree blobs - meanwhile, Linux was built around modules that could contain anything regardless of license, and happily accepted new patches and unknown maintainers. You still see it today: Linux literally built its own distributed VCS (git), while some BSDs are still on the hyper-centralized CVS. If there isn't an even more generous option is simply because building a mainstream OS is incredibly hard.
- jefftk 5d ago
  How open a platform is to external contributors is a very different axis than the legal permissiveness one the article describes.
  - toyg 5d ago
    It's the same axis: business-friendliness. The legal permissiveness described is critical for most software because it enables business adoption. But for a kernel, which sits at the intersection of hardware and software, "free as in beer" is not enough, there is another critical factor: how easy it is to make it work with proprietary hardware. A free kernel that won't work with my custom chip and whose maintainers won't accept the necessary patches to fix this state of things, is just useless to my business.

nekusar 5d ago

Change the GPL and make the GPL only apply to NATURAL HUMANS and NOT CORPORATE HUMANS. If the corporates want to use it, they can make a licensing agreement and put money into a trust of all who support it. They don't want to pay? Too fucking bad.

HeyLaughingBoy 5d ago
Or, you know, just use a different license?

Almondsetat 5d ago

Other than charity and donations, the only two ways of getting paid for developing FOSS are: 1) support contracts and 2) crowdfunding the next release. Digital goods live in a post-scarsity situation. Applying the same business model as real life products is crazy and it's the reason why we have Adobe&Co.

mw888 5d ago

I'm not convinced a problem is actually here. I certainly wouldn't believe LLMs, an optional tool, make any part of this fundamentally worse. Maybe superficially for people who can't adapt.

JohnHaugeland 5d ago

“we can force them to pay for free”

montroser 5d ago

Hard pass, thanks. Just, don't expect to get paid for maintaining open source projects. It's easy. Everyone knows the deal going in, and if somehow you missed that you're not going to get paid for this and you want out at any time -- you just stop. If you made something of value someone else who cares enough will pick it up. Or it can languish and the earth will keep spinning. It's fine.

deleted 5d ago

[deleted]

schneems 5d ago

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-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-event-september-2025/ 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 the details and the nuance matter. I reached out to Laurie on bsky when this was first published but didn’t hear back.

schneems 5d ago
Cannot edit to add: I left off Martin accidentally. Not intentionally. I don't actually know how involved he was with operations recently (he was a former acting OSS director for a short period a long while ago).

heelix 5d ago

One of the easiest ways to get paid for something is to to offer commercial support once something shifts to 'end of life' for community support. Can't get off of an old busted version - write a check for continued support! This sort of thing is reasonably easy to get through the accounting process. Leaving a tip, paying for something free, trying to send money to a group that our infrastructure absolutely relies on - stupid hard. Commercial support, on the other hand, is very understandable to the bean counters.

yding 5d ago

Great proposal Laurie! It'd be great if YC would set up an Open Source endowment also, with say 0.5% of their companies' stock (voluntarily) endowed to open source software.

antipaul 5d ago

Nobody pays for free (& open source) software?

illright 5d ago

I think it's a great idea and I hope someone inside the teams of popular registries sees this and they actually give it a go. I imagine the shitstorm of reactions that it's gonna cause from people who aren't even included in the "required to pay" group and I wish the registry maintainers strength to get through this

jhack 5d ago

FOSS == Free Open Source Software, fyi.

0xbadcafebee 5d ago

Honestly, the privilege and entitlement of some people. You made a thing, you did a lot of work, you gave it away for free. Nobody stole it from you. Nobody even asked you to make it. You created this situation yourself. And now you're upset that nobody paid you for the thing you make for free? "But but but... companies are making money... off the thing... that I gave them for free!! How dare they!! There is no way I could have seen this coming!!" - Either you were ignorant and didn't realize people would sell the thing you gave away, or you knew about it and are now pretending to be outraged at the thing you knew was going to happen. "But but but... they should pay me anyway, because they're profiting off my labor! It's what's fair!!" - What's fair is for someone to take you at your (and your software license's) word, to do exactly what you told them they could do (profit off it). What's not fair is to turn around after they're hooked on your free thing, and try to force them to pay you for it, after the fact. The point of open source is only to open up the source code, allow people to contribute, collaborate, and share. If you want to get paid for it too, don't put an open source license on it. It's that simple. Add whatever terms you want. But don't make FOSS and then later say it's unfair for people to do exactly what your license said they could do.

JacobKfromIRC 5d ago
Despite the submission title, I don't think I would call this proposal a way to force companies to pay for free software. They could choose not to pay if they don't want to use the software. If they've already downloaded the software, then they wouldn't need to pay unless they want to download it again, but they are free to make as many copies as they want so re-downloading is mostly going to be a matter of convenience I think. I believe free software is better than proprietary software, so I think it's good to better incentivize the production and maintenance of free software.
- 0xbadcafebee 5d ago
  Using nicer language doesn't change the argument. You're still suggesting that corporations be required to pay for the software, which is a reversal of the terms of the license. Let's ignore for the moment that this is manipulative behavior (switching from free to paid after the fact, the same thing users complain about corporations doing). This is likely also illegal. The software license is a contract. Permissive FOSS licenses grant the use of the software in current and future forms without payment. To withhold the source code until receiving payment would be a violation of the contract terms. All of the copyright holders would have to agree to change the license to no longer be Open Source, and even then a judge may well find it illegal. It's also a bad idea because it would split the community. I find this action so unethical that I would no longer contribute to or use any FOSS that required payment. I didn't get into this community to shake companies down for cash. If you want to make money off software, go do that somewhere else, or do it with services and support.

j2kun 5d ago

[flagged]

blastingrock 5d ago

Why would you write such an important article with AI? I can't share this with people I know because they will lose trust if I send them AI articles. It's really, very easy to tell because it's filled with AI rhetoric and you don't sound like this in your writing from 2020 and before

neiltalap 5d ago

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.

3stacks 5d ago

I don't understand why anyone takes this person seriously. He fell ass-backwards into a prominent company, got demoted after proving incapable of being the CTO, and then seemingly got promptly off-boarded after the acquisition and now just has a developer relations job. Not to denigrate that role, but it doesn't exactly confer authority for this to be the trajectory of your career.

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morninglight 5d ago

Our school system has been using FOSS products for years. In effect, it is a donation to a non-profit organization. However, I'm not aware of any of the creators reaping a tax deduction for their donation. Donating a used car to a non-profit has a well established path to this end. Are any FOSS authors using a similar method to attain some payback?

Grimeton 5d ago

There is nothing free in Android.

jamienk 5d ago

This is very interesting: it is a lot like the GLP (pun intended) solution: it doesn't try to "cure" the symptom, it just piggybacks onto the existing facts-on-the-ground and tries to make things better from there. I'm not totally sure I understand the "distribution/registries" thing though? This also related to GitHub and HF, right? And Netflix. (You mentioned Spotify.) How they host stuff and then leverage that position to build add-ons and lock-in, lobby for laws. Companies PAY for this "bandwidth." I always thought that BitTorrent would eventually take off and make these kinds of sites irrelevant, that it would democratize bandwidth, the last leg of the battle for universal accessibility. I like your idea. I wish you luck.

woodruffw 5d ago

(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.)

jongjong 5d ago
This is why I just advocate for UBI nowadays. It's impossible for certain people to get paid for work they do and value they create and the reasons are numerous and different for every single person. A lot of it is because human attention has been fully centralized and monopolized. Regulations are the nail in the coffin. This industry is cooked, to a crisp. Tech people who have been excluded from the tech markets should be paid some kind of compensation.
- woodruffw 5d ago
  I think Alex Gaynor is essentially right here[1]. [1]: https://alexgaynor.net/2025/apr/08/putting-a-price-tag-on-open-source/ https://alexgaynor.net/2025/apr/08/putting-a-price-tag-on-op...
  - jongjong 5d ago
    The first time I understood there is a systemic problem was years ago when I started attending investor events and was pitching my open source software to tech companies and investors and they were all asking me "But what are you selling?" and I kept telling them "I'm not selling anything, I'm just looking for adopters of my open source product." and I was shaking hands with every person in the room. They couldn't understand. They must have thought I was crazy. But the thing is, I couldn't even sell it for free. Even though it was provably useful and many similar companies did use my product successfully, at scale. It really felt like "It's a big club and you ain't in it." It was like; they couldn't believe how much work I was putting in to give away a product for free. I think it might have made some people uncomfortable even. And although I am more honest and cynical now about my own intentions, I still think that 'making money' was not and is not the primary goal; it was always a secondary goal which I planned to attend to later if/when the conditions would be right. I was literally just trying to get big companies to adopt so that other smaller companies would look at them and tell themselves "Look, it's OK, big company X is using the product, so I can use it too!" My goal was not to sell anything, it was to dismantle systemic taboos which worked against me as a small contributor. 10 years later, the taboos are worse than before! I don't know how anyone can start an open source project without the badge of corporate sponsorship these days.

MiroslavPokorny 5d ago

Its the same reason why the people who do the actual hard and deadly work get paid the least. This is true EVERYWHERE.

adrianN 5d ago

Software stacks are infrastructure. It makes sense to pay for infrastructure via taxes. That's why "Public Money, Public Code" is imho a great initiative. We should redirect the public money that we currently hand over to proprietary software vendors towards open source.

darylteo 5d ago

This immediately falls apart when you realise that the registry is also a company that doesn't pay for FOSS and does not have the competitive incentives to ever do so.

BubbleRings 5d ago

Am I missing something, or are most of the comments here not really addressing the pros and cons and possibilities in OP’s proposal?

ajnin 5d ago

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.

jongjong 5d ago

> They sell insurance against the maintainer, when the maintainer is the one person in the chain who can actually make the code more secure, and she gets nothing while a company two layers up gets paid to tell you whether she did. Damn, this is a really good line. It's the reason why existing tools like Snyk give so many false positives and miss so many actual vulnerabilities. They're kind of useless really. They create false comfort and busy-work for staff whilst providing a ready-made "Snyk said it was secure" narrative to cover everyone's asses when things inevitably go belly-up. And Snyk be like "We responded as fast as possible, so we fulfilled our part" yet what really counts is not even in the equation. Personally, I stopped contributing my code open source. I still write it and I've built a major project I'd love to make public but I'm keeping it for myself. I'm waiting for communism or UBI to arrive, then I may resume publishing as open source. If it takes too long, I will pass it down to my son and he will wait until communism arrives to make it public.

nocturndev55 5d ago

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jongjong 5d ago

I'm kind of disturbed that it took me 7 years to find out about the Feross incident: https://feross.org/funding-experiment-recap/ https://feross.org/funding-experiment-recap/ This guy is literally a high profile individual from my own niche Node.js open source community and I'm literally an open source developer from that exact same community and I had no idea.

aidenn0 5d ago

> Because there are two games going on, and they have different winners. In the code game the resource is the software itself, and free wins every time, because anybody can copy code, so any attempt to charge for it invites a copy that doesn't. In the supply game the resource is not having to think about where the code comes from, and that game is won by whoever is the default. This is, IMO misdiagnosing what's going on. Spending money is always friction. The number of ICs that can spend 4 figures of company money on a whim is much smaller than the number of ICs that can download libre software on a whim. Then once the company knows they are using the libre software and it adds value, people who can spend large sums of company money will want to do so to protect that value.

SamInTheShell 5d ago

MongoDB and Grafana seem to be doing fine. Idk that this logic holds up at face value. Like the HashiCorp, Elastic, and MinIO license changes pissed people because it was a rug pull on the community of people supporting and consuming those projects. If they had started as AGPL licensed and took the Mongo and Grafana approach, who knows what things would look like today.

necovek 5d ago

This is a great proposal, but other than the gamification worry, I wonder if it also changes the contribution model? Eg. how motivated are you to contribute an important set of fixes to an upstream package knowing that this package is getting lots of money for the maintainer, and would not get any for you? Would you instead fork hoping to get everybody to switch over to your fork (it could even be justified: "for quicker availability of fixes, here's my fork"), and then ride it out? Certainly not everybody would approach it that way, but I am certain some would. Others might not even want to contribute and would instead just file a bug expecting the maintainer to fix it (they are getting paid 30k a month by PyPI, they might as well fix it). Basically, whenever money enters the picture, the core dynamics change, and it'd hold especially so for FOSS.

nirui 5d ago

Depends on what you're doing, the "source-available" model may not work. Because many software earns their money through just few tricks, maybe it's more user-friendly design, maybe it's better predictive algorithm etc. These tricks hidden deep in the logic so it's hard for the competitors to figure out in months time. But if you made the source code available, the trick will be reveled in plan sight and you lose advantage quickly. After that, you turned software making a laborer's game (you need add laborer to add and/or steal ideas faster than your competitors), it's way less fun. If you want to make money, you have to play the art of balance. How much do you want to make open, and how much advantage you want to withhold.

Ekaros 5d ago

I have always wondered about most common tools. How much should maintainer of say bash be paid per install? Or per use? Or per month a system runs? What about all other core tools or common tools? Even most of things in say Linux? Surely those are much more important and more deserving than any service or whatever you run on them? You can't install that software without them. Or does these payments end somewhere? So money does not end up with those who wrote and now maintain them?

kelnos 5d ago

Why would this be implemented, though? The author talks about how companies don't pay OSS maintainers because they don't have to. But they often pay registry maintainers because they do have to (or they have to run their own, which they don't want to, so they pay). But why would the registry set up a system to pay maintainers? They don't have to, so why give up a part of their revenue stream? Either the registry's aims are profit, and they wouldn't want to do that, or their goal is to charge for operating costs to keep the lights on, and they wouldn't have the spare revenue to pay maintainers. The bottom line is the same: if someone has to pay for something, and there are no alternatives (or the alternatives are costly in other ways), then they will pay. If they don't have to pay, then they won't. If registries get developers to upload their code without paying them to do so, why would they voluntarily pay them?