alt Hacker NewsGitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month to fund open source
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>it is not okay to consider that this labor fell from the sky and is a gift, and that the people/person behind are just doing it for their own enjoyments
Yes it absolutely is. That is the exact social contract people 100% willingly enter by releasing something as Free and Open Source. They do give it as a gift, in exchange for maybe the tiny bit of niche recognition that comes with it, and often times out of simple generosity. Is that really so incredible?
Maybe it's just me, but I don't think the solution to the open source funding problem is to force people to pay for it. I think that goes against the spirit of open source. If there is forced payment, or even the expectation of payment, then we're not really doing the whole original open source thing, we're just doing bad source available commercial-ish software.
I think the solution is for people to understand that open source goes both ways. Unlike what this post says, users don't owe maintainers anything, but maintainers also don't owe the users anything. If I build something cool and share it freely, why should users expect anything from me? Why should you expect me to maintain it or add the features you want? I think we need a mentality change where less is expected from maintainers, unless funding is arranged.
After all, it's free and open source. No one is forcing you to use it. Don't like that I'm not actively developing it? Submit a PR or fork it. Isn't that what the original spirit of open source was? I think that open source has been so succesful and good that we've come to expect it to be almost like commercial software. That's not what it is.
If this actually happens, get ready for an avalanche of AI-generated garbage code that exists for the sole purpose of boosting a scammer's metrics, so they can maximize their slice of the pie with the minimum amount of effort. Spotify is dealing with this same issue around AI-generated music [1].
1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/lesliekatz/2024/09/08/man-charg...
Been living off grants and donations for a few years now. My 2c is you probably don't need to invent a new platform to fund open source development. There are tons of platforms and systems in place already. That's not's what's missing. You need to get open source developers that want to get paid for their work to spell that fact out to their users and supporters.
Yes this is uncomfortable, but the simple fact is that if you don't tell anyone you want to get paid, you probably won't be given any money. Standard seem to be maybe there's a donation link somewhere on the site, buried 4 clicks deep in the FAQ, more often than not something like a paypal.
The reality is that if you do ask for money, surprisingly often people will straight up just give you money if they like what you're doing. Like people get paid real money for screaming at video games on Twitch, meanwhile you're building something people find useful. Of course you can make money off it. But you gotta ask for it, the game screamers on twitch sure do. That's the secret. Sure there's a scale from asking for donations and doing a Jimmy Wales and putting a your face on a banner begging for donations; and while going full jimbo is arguably taking it too far, it's also probably closer to the optimum than you'd imagine.
If you have corporate users, word on the street is you can also just reach out to them and ask for sponsorship. They're not guaranteed to say yes, but they're extremely unlike to sponsor you spontaneously.
Proposals like these seem to assume that FOSS is mostly produced by unpaid volunteers. But a lot of the open-source stuff that I personally use is produced by massively profitable companies.
For example, I am currently working with React, which was produced by Meta. I write the code using TypeScript, which was produced by Microsoft (and other corporate behemoths such as Google). I am writing this comment in Chrome (produced by Google). Etc.
> Those funds would then be distributed by usage - every mention in a package.json or requirements.txt gets you a piece of the pie.
Usage is not a good proxy for value or ongoing effort. I have a npm package with tens of millions of weekly downloads. It's only a few lines long and it's basically done - no maintenance required.
I'm skeptical that there exists an algorithmic way to distribute funds that's both efficient and resistant to gaming.
The first order effect of this would be great, but the following onslaught of schlinkert spam would be devastating- its bad enough now with people making garbage dependencies and sneaking them in everywhere just for clout
If you willingly choose to make source code publicly available under an open source license you can’t then act all shocked that people don’t have to pay you for using that code. If you wanted to be guaranteed an income whenever your code gets used, you should have chosen a different license.
This would not fund the people you want it to fund.
Bad or borderline actors would be so much better at creating whatever metrics you're basing things off of that the actual value creators wouldn't stand a chance.
I think we sometimes treat "open" as automatically good without examining the tradeoffs.
You can easily sponsor Iran or Russia killing real people by doing such things.
Powerful tools, once released, can be used by anyone, including those with harmful intentions. And let's be honest: much of open source functions as a way for large companies to cut costs on essential but non-differentiating infrastructure. That's fine, but it complicates the idealistic narrative.
With generative AI, these questions matter more. Maybe it's time to revisit what open source should mean in this context.
GitHub already charges organisations to fund open source features. Otherwise it wouldn't lack so many enterprise level features, it wouldn't have half baked solution that do not take into consideration enterprise requirements. GH Actions for example is still not there yet after years
How bold to start with "Listen to me" then jump into something that doesn't make much economic sense and has not been properly considered
I paid 1 buck for WhatsApp back in the day. Better business model than what meta did with it. But we're moving closer and closer to 8 companies controlling the world. Both WhatsApp and github are owned by them.
While delegating fund collection and disbursement to one organization reduces overhead for each project, the centralized nature of the setup can be asking for trouble.
Instead, why not accept the reality that 1) projects may charge for their offerings and 2) users may have to pay for such offerings? As a user, if a project's offering is useful to me, then I should be willing to pay for it. As a creator, if I want to get paid for my offering, then I should be willing to ask for it. An upside of such a change could be that we start being more focused and prudent about what we use and create.
Without such delegation, projects will have to do the heavy lifting in terms of collection of funds; features such as sponsorship in GH or setting up e-payments via Stripe or Paypay may help reduce this brunt.
I have a better idea-- why doesn't GitHub (that closed source platform) donate 20% of all revenue to opensource projects that enable the company to exist?
I'm not a fan of Github, I prefer to promote the competition, and I'm definitely not a fan of Microsoft, but Github is already sponsoring open source with unlimited repos.
So this is a weird statement to me, like you always want more.
I've spent a bit of time thinking about this[0] - as a maintainer (oapi-codegen, Renovate, previously Jenkins Job DSL Plugin and Wiremock), as someone who used to work on "how can we better fund our company's dependencies", and building projects and products to better understand dependency usage
As others have noted, there are a few areas to watch out for, and:
- some ecosystems have more dependencies over fewer, and so we need to consider how to apply a careful weighting in line with that - how do we handle forks? Does a % of the money go to the original maintainers who did 80% of the work? - how can companies be clever to not need to pay this? - some maintainers don't want financial support, and that's OK - some project creators / maintainers don't get into the work for the money (... because there is often very little) - there's a risk of funding requirements leading to "I'm not merging your PR without you paying me" which is /not problematic/ but may not be how some people (in particular companies) would like to operate
[0]: https://www.jvt.me/posts/2025/02/20/funding-oss-product/
No idea why this has got the traction it has. Absurd and poorly thought through. It sounds like you don’t like building open source software, so stop doing it. Don’t write a blog post whining about the cage you have shut yourself in. Absolute martyr complex.
The transitive nature of dependencies makes fund allocation extremely wonky. Say you have Next.js as a dependency in your package.json file? How many dependencies does Next.js itself have? What portion of your funds go to Next.js versus all the transitive dependencies of Next.js?
Open source work is not a product, it is a gift to the community with no strings attached, and that goes both ways. You don't ask people who give you a gift to then unbox it, set it up, and maintain it for you.
This is the classic "if everyone gave 5 cents" thing. But If GitHub charged $1 more per month, how would they raise prices later then?
So you sprinkle a few tens of thousands of dollars across a few hundreds of thousands of developers every month? Thanks for the $0.48 Github.
s/thousands/millions/ the point stands that there are way more devs than commercial accounts, and even then, even if it's 1:1, you get $1?
One thing I thought that got me interested about Brave was this part of their business modell. It had the potential to support this type of economy almost without any attrition. It was not that different from flattr, with the difference that people would be able to contribute just by accepting the notification ads and passing along their earnings.
Unfortunately, the crypto angle made sure that mostly degens and speculators got into it. Perhaps if stabletokens were more established by the time they started, it would be easier to market it.
(I am not going to get into yet-another discussion about Brave as a company. I will flag any attempt at derailing the conversation.)
>It is crazy, absolutely crazy to depend on open source to be free (as beer).
Why? It's not crazy at all. It's the status quo with no sign of things changing. It is both possible right now and likely continue. Its not crazy.
If it's not worth maintaining people will stop. If people need it they will develop it. The current incentive structure has produced lots of open source code that is being maintained.
>It is not okay - it is not okay to consider that this labor fell from the sky and is a gift, and that the people/person behind are just doing it for their own enjoyments.
It is if there is no cost. You can always charge for it. But you can't make it free then pretend its not.
Being on both sides of the open source value relationship, I feel somewhat skeptical of mechanisms that use dependency cardinality/"popularity" to allocate funding: at its best it's a proxy for core functionality (which is sometimes, but not always, the actually hard/maintenance-intensive stuff) and at its worst it incentivizes dependency proliferation (since two small core packages would be equally as popular as one medium-sized one).
No. Take some of that enterprise cash and lay it aside on a daily lottery which devs automatically enter based on usage metrics. And a bit more enterprise aside to give directly to the customers' deep dependency maintainers (which gh already knows).
I've seen plenty of cases of making something a target where quality won't be measurable and immediately cut off the reward or apply penalties. I don't really want Microsoft to run a large fund that encourages people to try to take over roles and request cash, etc.
Literally anyone could create a support and maintenance organization that takes MIT license projects into an AWS like split and only get paid if the support they provide remains valuable to people who pay for the value of the support and maintenance.
Static rules will be gamed.
It's easy to predict what sort of incentives this would produce, and how bad they would be. Fewer users and way more spammy projects to say the least.
GH could easily end up having to spend more than it collected in fighting abuse.
An Open Letter to Hobbyists has a similar ring to it: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/su...
This transformation of open-source into rent-seeking behaviour is quite distasteful to me. If you don't want to share your stuff without taxing everyone, then don't share it. Other licenses exist. You don't have to use MIT or the GPL.
Meta has even demonstrated an alternative with the Llama 4 License which has exclusion criteria:
> 2. Additional Commercial Terms. If, on the Llama 4 version release date, the monthly active users of the products or services made available by or for Licensee, or Licensee’s affiliates, is greater than 700 million monthly active users in the preceding calendar month, you must request a license from Meta, which Meta may grant to you in its sole discretion, and you are not authorized to exercise any of the rights under this Agreement unless or until Meta otherwise expressly grants you such rights.
Go put such terms in your licenses.
This is particularly rampant in the Rust community and if I'm being honest this forced tithing church nonsense from people who want to be priests makes participating in that community less desirable. I don't even want to donate to the RSF as a result.
All the other projects I've donated to in the past have been much more reasonable. This kind of pushy nonsense is unacceptable.
There's Drips that kinda works like this I think
No. I would get rid of "should" to "could" but it actually would warp the open source world once money is involved. People would start optimizing what they do to try and get a slice of the pie.
$1 USD is ~90 Indian Rupees, 1450 Argentinian Peso or over 1 million Iranian Rial [1]. In some places, $1 USD could be a week's work. On the collection side, you could be seriously over-charging people. On the distribution side, you could be seriously overpaying people for their work - and encourage scams, etc.
> GitHub should charge every org $1 more per user per month and direct it into an Open Source fund, held in escrow.
Sure. It'll be some charity, then somebody gets paid $200k+ per year to distribute what remains after they've taken the majority, all whilst avoiding most taxes. To receive the money the person has to ID themselves, financial background checks need to be done, a minimum amount needs to be reached before a payment is made, and then after passing through multiple wanting hands, they end up with a fraction.
> Those funds would then be distributed by usage - every mention in a package.json or requirements.txt gets you a piece of the pie.
What even is "usage"? How many times it appears in a number of repos? How many users there are of the project? Is the usefulness and value of a project limited to the number of people that directly use it?
> Or don’t! Let’s not do anything! People’s code and efforts - fueling incredibly critical bits of infrastructure all around the world - should just be up for grabs. Haha! Suckers!
> Anyway, you all smarter than me people can figure it out. I just cannot accept that what we have is “GOOD”. xx
It's entirely possible you can make things worse by avoiding doing nothing. Sometimes in life you have to pick the lesser of evils.
Not a great take.
Corporations who use and benefit from software should be made to pay for their use of that software, but they don't want to, which is why they'll happily spend money promoting the use of corporate-friendly and maximally exploitable open source licensing among the passionate individuals who maintain the lions share of their dependency tree.
> every mention in a package.json or requirements.txt
OK, what about those of us who aren't writing libraries?
As a personal anecdote, the amount of opportunities that have been opened up to me as a result of my open source project are worth way more than any $1 per mention or user.
If this ever happened I imagine private equity would begin taking control of open source projects.
Many open source projects are created by engineers being paid to solve a problem their employer has, and they just happen to release it freely.
I don't think Google needs a dollar every time I write a script in golang or run a container in kubernetes, and I would put a lot less trust in Envoy if I thought Lyft was building it profit and not because they needed to.
Github should charge everyone $1 more to disable Copilot on accounts.
Instead of a dollar from github users, I think it should just be a hefty tax on big tech companies that have valuations of over a billion. The nature of software and tech means that there are massive monopolies where winner takes all. We should just accept that and leverage it.
OSS works partially because a lot of stuff is free as in beer. I rely on probably many thousands of OSS projects directly or indirectly on a daily basis. So does everyone else.
The problem for some people is that they want to get paid for their work and just aren't; or not enough. I won't judge that. Writing software is hard work. Whether you donate your time and how much of your time is a personal choice to make. But of course a lot of OSS gets paid for indirectly via companies paying people to work on them (most long lived projects have paid contributors like that) or in a few cases because the companies behind these projects have some business model that actually works. Some people donate money to things they like. And some projects are parked under foundations that accept donations. That's all fine. But there are also an enormous amount of projects out there and most of them will never receive a dollar for any of it. OSS wouldn't work without this long tail of unpaid contributors.
I have a few OSS projects of my own. I don't accept donations for them. I don't get paid for them. I have my own reasons for creating these projects; but money isn't one of those. And people are welcome to use them. That's why these projects are open source.
MS and Github make loads of money. There's a reason they give the freemium version away for free: it funnels enough people into the non free version that it is worth it to them. Charging money to everyone might actually break that for them. I happily use their freemium stuff. I did pay for it a long time ago when private projects weren't part of the freemium layer. Anyway their reasons/motivations are theirs. I'm sure it all makes sense for them and their share holders.
If people feel guilty about not donating to each of the thousands of projects they rely on (or any, because why cherry pick?), you can pay back in a different way and try to contribute once in a while. Just pay it forward. Yes you somebody put a lot of work in the stuff that you use. And you put some work in stuff that others get to use. If enough people keep on doing that (and the success of OSS hints that they do), OSS will be here to stay.
IMHO Open Source Software is a public good, and should be mostly funded like other public goods: through government grants.
GitHub charging its users, who themselves are mostly OSS developers (and not end users) doesn't seem like a sensible solution.
GitHub cannot see enterprise repos. Those are purposely kept on-prem.
This is a terrible idea in my opinion and it's been tried/is being tried by services like thanks.dev. Yes, we need something here but this is not it. The reality is more complex.
It doesn't work well in practice. Because then people like https://github.com/sindresorhus?tab=repositories&type=source would get a shit ton of money because of the pure number of dependencies. And yes our stack also contains his code somewhere in a debug UI but our main product is entirely written in a different programming language with way fewer dependencies but if one of them goes away we'd be in trouble. In other words: Dependency count is not a good metric for this.
GitHub actually offers something in that direction: https://github.com/sponsors/explore
My "idea": Lots of companies will have to create SBOMs anyway. Take all of those but also scan your machines and take all the open source software running on there (your package.lock does not contain VLC etc.) and throw it in a big company wide BOM, then somehow prioritise those using algorithms, data and just manual voting and then upload that to some distributor who then distributes this to all the relevant organisations and people and then (crucially) sends me (as a company) an invoice.
We've tried doing the right thing but sponsoring is hard - it works differently for every project/foundation and the administrative overhead is huge.
The reality is that "we" as an open-source community suck at taking money and I believe this is partially on us.
How about GitHub stops using GPL'd code to train models? The authors weren't asking for payment, they were just asking not to reuse their code without GPL.
> Those funds would then be distributed by usage - every mention in a package.json or requirements.txt gets you a piece of the pie.
Could have worked before LLMs.
Also, funding by popularity would mean alternatives would have a harder time to emerge and get the funding they need to compete against the established popular projects.
Being an Open Source project doesn't mean that it provides the best solution to the problem it's supposed to solve. Diversity is important.
Oh, I know! Let’s redistribute royalty payments from AI subscriptions in Spotify-fashion from OpenAI and friends to developers, kind of like how Spotify pays artists for streams we get a cut of the token. Oh wait… no one’s profitable yet. Right.
That would be fun. Could over time round roughly to charging everyone to fund the use of GitHub Copilot to work on open source.
If you pay for it to gain the access, then it is not open source. In open source, everyone can access it and contribute (in theory).
Tax large companies properly then you don't have to tax the public for things like this.
> it is not okay to consider that this labor fell from the sky and is a gift, and that the people/person behind are just doing it for their own enjoyments.
I am. I enjoy making things, and it's even better when others enjoy them. Just because you have expectations that you should be compensated for everything line of code you write; doesn't make it ubiquitous, nor should your expectations be considered the default.
I'd argue If you're creating and releasing open source with the expectations of compensation, you're doing it wrong. Equally, if you expect someone creating open source owes you anything, you're also part of the problem, (and part of why people feel they deserve compensation for something that used to be considered a gift).
All that said, you should take care of your people, if you can help others; especially when you depend on them. I think you should try. Or rather, I hope you would.