> The recent monetization strategy for Maven Central has been bizarre.

Well, someone gotta pay the bills and it is not surprising given that they began to squeeze Sonatype Nexus operators for money a few years ago.

The core problem is that sooooo much of the core infrastructure we assume as "given" is in fact not owned and operated by a non-profit NGO (such as e.g. Codeberg is) but by a commercial company.

Sonatype operates Maven Central, NuGet, Github and NPM are run (into the ground) by Microsoft, Gitlab is funded by its commercial arm and, assumedly, a lot of venture capital that eventually wants to be returned to the investors, Sourceforge always was infamous for how they monetized (while the majority of the actual hosting cost was borne by universities LOL). The only major artifact repository I'm aware of that is not backed by either big corporate or NGOs and not tied to some Linux distribution is PHP Composer's Packagist that has a commercial arm, but no venture capital.

And in the end, the real issue at the root is that internet traffic, especially egress traffic, still is absurdly expensive, and the behavior of people like Sam Altman that sent RAM, SSD and even HDD prices through the roof is making the situation even worse.

So, so much negative side effects have been caused by just this one human. Sam Altman is nothing short of Thomas Midgley Jr.