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.

  • ambitiousslab@feddit.ukEnglish
    7·
    7 hours ago

    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.