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.

  • calliope@retrolemmy.com
    31·
    5 hours ago

    “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.

    • nomad@infosec.pub
      11·
      39 minutes ago

      All my free software is under MIT license. But charging money for using my software would entail license changes and would make the software less free and incentives change to do things that make money instead of sound software.

      • calliope@retrolemmy.com
        1·
        9 minutes ago

        Neither of these directly apply to what I was clearly responding to, which was

        Then it wouldn’t be free as in FOSS.

        Which is factually incorrect and seems to imply a common misconception.

        Since MIT an unrestrictive license, people can even sell your software. It’s even a short license and it’s easy to read.

        The other software that might be referenced in your software is another story. But someone can sell your modifications with the MIT license. They don’t even have to ask.