Open source isn't a tip jar – it's time to charge for access

Please, just pick a side.

"I want to be the selfless craftsperson giving away work for free to anyone, but I'll also pressure profit-maximizing evil mega-corporations to give me money from the good of their heart, despite the fact that I've explicitly stated in the license they don't have to" is just not a smart position to hold.

If you want evil corporations to have to pay money in exchange for using your software, add that as a condition in the license. Ah, but then it's not "free software", sorry.

There's so much unexplored space in licenses that achieve better outcomes for both the developers and their non-giant-evil-conglomerate users, but nobody is willing to touch that subject, because then they're not writing "real free software" and the "FOSS community" will not use it.

I highly suspect that these people who push for paid open source are NOT open source maintainers.

If I wanted to get paid for the software I make in my free time, I would put a price on it.

If someone likes what I do personally, they can donate on my Patreon or kofi or whatever.

If I want my project to only be used for other free software, then I make it GPL or AGPL. That's it.

If someone uses my software and works for a company and needs support, we can talk about a support contract.

The tip jar is fine, the problem is that most corporations have no process to drop anything in the tip jar without purchase orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters.

The same process is why open source is such a hit among the developers that actually accomplish real work in such corporations.

True open source is dead. Ai and big tech will eat it instantly. Dual licensure is ok (AGPL+paid). You can disagree but then don’t whine when someone instantly repackages and markets your tool and gets paid when you don’t.

> I mean, after all, they've made billions from this code.

As someone whose dream job is to just build open source software and have a comfortable life, I'm highly sympathetic to open source sustainability and I do hope we continue to seek for solutions.

But this type of statement is ridiculous. There is a hell of a lot more to business than just the code, despite what many of us software engineers want to think. It's also quite rare for a commercial company to airlift an open source project and make billions on it. There is also a massive spectrum/range of open source, from tiny nearly throwaway libraries up to massive applications.

Turning open source into commercial software is NOT the solution. Commercial software has existed forever, and continues to (try doing something non-trivial with PDFs if you want a modern painful example). If open source becomes commercial software, we'd be losing out on a mountain of greatness. Imagine if downloading a Linux distro required paying for and receiving a license? And if you want to make a distro, be prepared to buy licenses for OpenSSL and every little thing that makes up that system, and set up your accounting books and what not so you can properly distribute all your revenues to the thousands (or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands) of sub-projects. And don't forget that you also have to have technical/legal apparati capable of enforcing, maybe auditing, etc.

Nothing is stopping you from spinning your open source project into a commercial operation right now. Plenty of people do it (it's usually called "source available" because you largely have to, by necessity, restrict redistribution, which makes it no longer "open source" according to most definitions of said term). The great thing about freedom and choice is that you can go whichever direction you want.

Open source will be bigger than ever, but not necessarily for the right reasons.

IMHO, as coding agents mature, we will see a surge in open-source projects. Most will remain obscure due to poor discoverability and growing competition for users' attention. But the same forces driving that growth in volume will likely erode quality and it most certainly raising ethical concerns. A company can now perform a clean-room reimplementation of an open-source project and potentially maintain it going forward with more resources and polish than the original.

For the most successful, high-impact projects, this creates a real problem that they risk losing momentum to well-funded clones.

At that point, what is the incentive to keep building in the open?

I've long held that open source is one of the world's biggest anarchist experiments. Anarchism, as understood by the likes of Kropotkin, largely believed that we can self organize towards working for the wellbeing of all, that s self organized groups will genuinely build useful and high quality tools.

Rather than turning open source into just another commercial effort, I'd love to explore going the other way. Why do we need to pay open source developers? They need housing, food, etc. Maybe the better answer is to figure out how to make those things freely available to open source developers.

It's possible to imagine a world where everything works like open source -- share what you have in excess, take what you need, work on something you enjoy for the betterment of all.

I deeply dislike this framing of mega corps vs volunteer devs. It conveniently ignores the huge amount of open source being developed by regular salaried devs as part of their job. Imho that is what we need more of instead of trying to redirect some money to these individuals which to me seems inherently unstable approach.

To make that happen I think companies should be more willing to develop and publish their own patches instead of relying on upstream for anything. Overall I think in the open source world the idea of (centralized upstream) "project" has gotten way overinflated.

no, I work on open source because I want it to be freely available to all, without conditions

I view it as a type of charity. I know not everybody can afford to use their time without compensation. that's ok!

but I will personally never charge, and I oppose this commercial mindset

If new (and existing too!) projects use the AGPL, isn't that sufficient to deter the worst offenders ?

MIT license + a standard rate.

Something like " If you require customizations or enhancements we bill at 1000$ an hour, 8 hour minimum."

I don't particularly care if someone working at Microsoft or whatever sees my open source project and decides to use it. That's fantastic. But I'm absolutely not going to work for Microsoft for free, so they need something for one of their use cases they need to pay up.

> 82 percent of Maven Central demand comes from fewer than 1 percent of IPs

This is interesting, and the author goes on to say that 80% comes from the largest cloud providers. But I wonder how much of that is coming from CI pipelines and how much is actually the cloud provider's usage?

I like Cryptomator's solution: donate to get a pretty banner.

Also, it didn't work -- Mountain Duck is closed source.

Personally I donate €50 every now and then when the average of the donation goes below a certain value (varies by project) but it requires tracking in a Spreadsheet.

Please just use the AGPL or shut up. If you release under a license that encourages freeloaders, you will get freeloaders.

Maybe providers of these services should start randomly return 402 return code. At least for those request which do not have sufficient authentication linked to existing payments.

This article conflates multiple issues:

Paying for hosting costs seems straightforward. Sonatype has decided to host Maven Central and treat it effectively as a marketing expense, and they are free to change that if they want. Same for the hosts of PyPi, RubyGems, etc.

Developer labor is a separate issue and what most people (including the article author) seem most confused about. Open source developers generally fall into one of a few different categories: Hobbyists looking for enjoyment, aspiring professionals looking for experience, startups looking for exposure and adoption, and corporate employees maintaining software their business relies on.

Contributors to vast majority of usable software fall into the last category, yet all of the focus is on the subset of people in the first category that attract a userbase that is meaningful enough to theoretically warrant some support, which is probably the smallest faction of open source developers by a large margin.

I do not understand the angst over this. If a hobbyist gets tired of their hobby, they are free to move on. If they feel exploited by some big corporation, change the license going forward, make the repo private, push harder for compensation until they feel properly compensated, or take whatever other action resolves their internal issue.

All the other categories of developer are fine as is, and the dissatisfied category could be as well if they took more agency over the situation.

This is absurd, it's not open source if you charge for access that's just a product.

> We must realign how businesses work with open source so that payment is no longer an optional charitable gift but a cost of doing business. To do that, we need an organization to create a viable, supportable path from big business to individual programmer. It's time for someone to step up and make this happen. Businesses, open source software, and maintainers will all be better off for it.

Congratulations, you rediscovered commercial software - where you are legally obligated pay to use software.

When looking at the OpenBSD Foundation list of donors, I can see Microsoft has giving a decent amount to OpenBSD over the years. I assume for use of OpenSSH. I have to give MS credit for this.

Now for a different company, IBM is completely missing and they use OpenSSH everywhere, even on AIX. And now it is even more glaring since they own Red Hat.

Yes this is a small "survey", but it shows not all large companies donates to projects that are really critical to their products.

So yes, at the very least, if your company depends upon a Open Source Project, you should throw a bit over the wall :)

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