saved
Nobody pays for open source. We can force them to.
Hraness cites a source capture. The source author remains the source.
gist
Laurie Voss argues that thirty years of voluntary open-source funding failed because asking does not scale, while the real money already flows to registry and supply-chain vendors. Free licenses win the code game against forks, but defaults win the supply game and can charge. His fix is for registries to meter corporate use, take a royalty, and route it pro rata to packages in paying customers' dependency trees—paying usefulness without application forms, just as LLM-driven demand makes supply harder to guarantee.
ideas
- Freest licenses are the ESS. MIT/BSD/Apache beat less-generous doves; Elastic, HashiCorp, and Redis lost share to forks until they climbed back toward open licenses.
- Burnout is the equilibrium. Serial near-burnout among unpaid maintainers is not system failure; it is the stable cost of free winning share while closed wins profit.
- Supply money is already paid upstream. JFrog, Snyk, Docker, Chainguard, and Sonatype bill for dependable free-code supply; maintainers sit below the capture point.
- Put the toll at the registry. Meter corporate pulls, add a royalty line to invoices companies already pay, and distribute pro rata down dependency trees automatically.
- Pay usefulness, not asking. Tips and foundations miss the long tail; LLMs lengthen that tail and raise supply risk, so who gets paid at the meter matters more now.
quotes
“Charity doesn't scale, and nobody has the authority to issue a mandate.”
“The supply of money was never the problem, the problem is where it gets captured on the way down.”
“Free wins the code game, but the supply game is won by whoever is the default, and defaults can charge.”
“The mechanism should pay people for being useful, not for being good at asking.”