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.