There’s been some discussions recently about how to fund open source, usually by abandoning it in some fashion. This is instead proposing that a “royalties” mechanism is established by existing repositories.
Making corporate pay for their freeloading is always good to consider.
Then it wouldn’t be free as in FOSS. Also the incentives change and now we get enshittification.
Agreed
“Free” in FOSS doesn’t mean free from cost. It means free to do what you want with it.
It does overlap often, but there are licenses that let you sell open source software, like the widely-used MIT license.
Then it wouldn’t be free as in FOSS
I had the same perception as you before I read the article, so I presume we both made the same wrong assumption. Apologies if I misunderstood your comment.
It’s not suggesting anyone changes the licenses to enforce this. Instead, it suggests that the package repositories should charge companies for access. Companies that want to use a free mirror will, but many will pay for convenience of using the official repository. A cut of that money is then automatically shared to maintainers.
If a company is going to pay for software, they’ll expect support as part of that license, and OSS doesn’t provide that in most cases. It’ll end up with people setting up companies that offer the OSS + support. This is what Chainguard is/does.
Maybe there’s a world where Chainguard pays the OSS devs for new versions, but the more likely outcome is that “registry gated” projects just get banned from use by devs, like most companies will do for ones with anti commercial licenses.
