Thirty years of voluntary funding schemes haven't paid open source maintainers because asking doesn't scale. The real money already flows — to JFrog, Docker, Sonatype — at the registry layer. The fix: registries charge companies for supply (they already do), then route a slice automatically to the maintainers who make that supply worth having.

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.

  • t3rmit3@beehaw.org
    13·
    8 hours ago

    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.