after reading Ford Foundation document [0] i'll go beyond and purpose FOSS not only limit commercial use but also forking [1] as it seems we have an endless stream of libraries which do the same thing, scattering even more this "fragile" ecosystem which would benefit so much of big tech's evergreen
Being able to fork your own version is a desirable goal and by design. The original author can and will probably not want to take his project in all kind of imaginable directions.
I'm not sure it fits the free and/or libre software philosophy but I'm a big fan of releasing otherwise free and open source software as a paid version and with some exclusive QoL features in proprietary store fronts.
For example Krita. https://krita.org/en/download/ FOSS but you can buy it on Steam, Microsoft Store, Epic Store, and Apple Store. You get one exclusive feature, automatic updates (and more recently Steam Cloud sync support), and you also support the developers (on the other hand Valve, MS, Epic, and Apple also gets a cut too).
If you read for example the Steam reviews everyone points out that it's a free software but buying on Steam is also a good and very importantly straightforward way to support the devs + the platform itself has such a pull ("buying games you never play") that people buy it just for the case of having it in their library
Filebot used to be open source. I bought it on the AppStore, it was a way to support development and I figured it would give me easier updates that would just happen in the background.
When Apple moved to ARM, the App Store version lagged behind. An ARM version was available, but not in the App Store. I assume this is because that ARM version was a separate download instead of being a universal app, and the x86 app would run on everything (for now).
The app is no longer open source, and is paid. To get the ARM version (due to my stubbornness in not wanting to install Rosetta), I had to pay again just to get the app through a different means of distribution.
Too many run-ins with silly issues like this can really sour a person on the “free app in a paid store” model.
That can happen regardless of which storefront you use to buy a free app. It's more of a developer-specific nitpick than a chronic problem with FOSS and freeware.
If you're happy to sponsor the app's development, then owning the App Store version should make you feel proud. The developer is still able to make a living thanks to you, and they're offering extended support if you're unwilling to use a fork of the free version. A good example of this is Dwarf Fortress, which I have bought on Steam 3 times now so that I could gift it to two of my friends. God willing, nothing will prevent me from buying a 4th and 5th copy when Christmas rolls around.
Yet by the active unique user numbers they have estimated sold at least ~168k copies and maybe upwards ~500k https://steamdb.info/app/280680/charts/ And that's Steam alone. I'd be really curious compared to this how many people click on the Donate button on the Krita homepage.
That's a lot of purchases imo for a project like this. I'm kind of ambivalent about the store cuts but they give a huge enough exposure to any game or software.
The free software philosophy aside, I feel like another problem is that once you start accepting payments then you start accepting various forms of responsibility/liability/accountability/etc. along with it. At a high enough price it'd become worth it, but that might not be anywhere near the price that your customers/users want to support you at.
I think I have donated more for Inkscape, Gimp, Firefox, and Libre Office than I ever spent on proprietary software. I also tend to buy paid versions of open-source apps in app stores, where available. It's great when a piece of open-source software has an easy donation link / button.
That said, I tend to trust all closed-source software significantly less, even if it's given away for free. Especially is it's given away for free.
I feel like the main issue with projects switching between a permissive and less permissive license and back is that starting out as fully permissive in the first place was the main error.
If everybody would just agree to start their open source code as something like source-available or OpenRAIL -requiring companies with more than $5M in annual revenue to pay for the work - we wouldn't be in this situation.
Yeah its a bait and switch. People want the social credit, early adoption, and community embrace of being open source, but they also want a captive business model.
It's not a bait and switch because the old version of the software that was released with the old license can still be used as such. If you call this bait and switch then I suppose this means that you somehow feel entitled to future versions of the software having the same license, forever.
They won't do this, because starting out as non-free doesn't get the same traction. Now that I think about it, it's basically a form of enshitification: draw people in with one deal, then after they're onboard, change it to something less favorable.
I think the issue is more on how you audit such things. Governments struggle (partially by design, but still) to get proper audits on who uses what and how much money they make.
The theory is great, but I'm unsure how you execute this.
The usual pushback I get from FOSS zealots is that any time I mention things like money, popularity, increasing adoption etc. they just say none of that matters because it's "not a project goal."
In fact, often they don't even want money to be a thing at all, they think capitalism is inherently evil (cough innovation) and would prefer if everyone was just poor and lived in the woods or something.
Sorry... I like the world to be a little more interesting than that.
These are the currencies of the VC world, and many open source developers don't release their work for those reasons (myself included, limited though my contributions are). It seems strange to deride them as making the world uninteresting because of this.
Modern society has done a wonderful job proving that sentiment right. I can't blame them.
would prefer if everyone was just poor and lived in the woods or something.
I'd prefer if everyone had proper control over the tools they used. Whether they choose to live in the woods to use such tools or use them to make society a worse place is the double edged of 'free' (as in freedom)
I completely understand those skeptical about perverse incentives from not making software 'free' (as in beer). It shouldn't be a surprise that adding monetary inventice changes the entire incentive structure.
I’m not sure who is worse, the people who want everyone to be poor and live in the woods, or the ones who want to monetize every human interaction until you need a microtransaction to unlock your front door.
Now, finally, I have an idea. It's gonna take 5000 words to get there, though, so if you don't have that kind of time, skip to the part about registries.
This article is full of LLMisms, which is to be expected but maybe it wouldn't be 5000 words and wouldn't need this disclaimer if they wrote it themselves
The only llmism I sensed is the use of "load bearing". Im usually queasy after reading llm slop, and stop before the end. This didn't have that effect.
Maybe the llms are getting better, but either way, this article reads like a real hunan write the whole thing.
Humans don't write things like: "Now, the popular way to tell this story is "the system is breaking," and I don't think that's right, and the distinction matters."
While I’m usually one to also get annoyed at uncurated slop, this doesn’t strike me in any way as LLM text, and likely something the author meant in earnest. I reads lot of LLM text. What part about it appeared generated to you?
From my perspective the piece was well structured, paced and thought through (and yes, a bit long)
Isn't this similar to the anaconda model? (Except they keep the money instead of distributing it.)
Depending on how you count, in my research group we are like 10 and in my whoooole university we are like 60.000 employees. When they went from free to restriced for big organizations I just uninstaled it.
No, but "free as in speech" effectively precludes making money from sales of the software. As soon as you sell it to one person, that person can give it to others for less than he paid you (all the way down to free), so nobody has a reason to pay you any more. There's a reason FOSS survives on donations or service, rather than selling copies of the software.
I'm not reading an AI slop article, but there's nothing in either the Free Software Definition or the Open Source Definition restricting the selling of software. It does prevent you from restricting people from sharing that software once they've bought it, but you could always use a threshold pledge system to ensure you get enough money before releasing anything:
Not the same at all. Free as in beer means you get nothing. Free as in speech allows you to get as much money as you can using a threshold pledge system. This isn't just theoretical: the famous 3D modelling software Blender was released this way, becoming Free Software only after a €100,000 payment.
"We encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. ... So if you are redistributing copies of free software, you might as well charge a substantial fee and make some money. Redistributing free software is a good and legitimate activity; if you do it, you might as well make a profit from it. ... Distributing free software is an opportunity to raise funds for development. Don't waste it!" https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
Indeed! While reading the original post, I was reminded of the old essays where RMS made it abundantly clear that charging for delivery media was absolutely ok - and if you wanted GNU updates, you should send in the stamps necessary to send them back to you.
Maintaining a popular registry is very hard work, hard enough that commercial entities would rather pay than having to do it themselves. It is literally SaaS. It could absolutely be monetized for the common good - although the gamification worry is real, and the governance would be really difficult to defend from sharks. But there might be clever ways to fix those issues.
The one thing you cannot fix is the cross-planet level playing field that registries provide. Today, a small African company can pull from a registry more or less in the same way as large US corporations. If you put a toll booth up, the toll will soon be too high for people in various parts of the world.
The reason I dislike this is because of the game it creates. Let's say we have someone who developed a small, well-used dependency (say: xz) but there is now incentive to be "in the dependency chain." xz is open, LLMs are really good at stealing/recreating; what stops someone from publishing rxz (maybe a rust port, maybe a gnu-r port, maybe it's "Really fast" xz, maybe it's just hoping for a typo in a registry.) This new dependency adds very little over the original xz and xz could have just used a simple PR.
On the other side of things, does accepting a PR from someone grant the author the ability to collect royalties for that software project? If so, how would you quantify that? LOC seems like a quick but really bad answer for what it is incentivizing.
For many, the entire point of "F" in "FOSS" is not getting tangled up in this kind of mess. I personally would never want to add "am I opening myself up to a lawsuit if I don't pay someone for their PR" to enter my calculus of accepting a PR. Especially if this is because I reject payment at all on a project.
Finally, if a company/employee submits code to FOSS under this model, do they now expect a return?
This new dependency adds very little over the original xz and xz could have just used a simple PR.
I kind of like the incentives created by this competition. This "what if someone takes your software, adds one feature, and sells it" argument has been made many times and I think the answer is that you, as the original maintainer, are in the best position to add features and if you squander that position you deserve to lose.
Seriously imagine the consequences of this "eat or be eaten" approach. What it incentivizes is not feature development per se, but fragmentation for the sake of it. This in turn leads to less attentation toward maintaining the shared base of the fragmented forks, as it has been superseded with features X and Y in different, probably incompatible forks.
how about making money from something else like hardware, to fund software (almost like IP is a fiction and people should be making money from tangible things rather than info)
I'm sure AI can also brainstorm more ideas for (F)OSS business models today
If you want people to pay you for your software, stop writing it for free. Conversely, if you write it for free, don't expect people to pay you for it. Otherwise you are no better than someone at an intersection with a bottle of Windex and a squeegee who, unsolicited, cleans a windshield and then demands the driver to pay for it.
The original authors of Free Software and open source were career academics and others who were paid to do other things, or were sponsored by scientific and defense research grants. I don't know how anyone got the nutty idea that you could make money on FOSS itself. Practically every time someone has tried to make money on FOSS it has failed.
(Edit: this comment previously ended with "...from Netscape on down.")
Netscape basically died and was replaced by Firefox which doesn't/can't effectively charge users for the software so instead makes money by selling default search engine, etc.
Netscape existed as the internet was coming into existence. You used to have to buy a physical copy in the store to install it. People barely knew how to use their computers so the activation cost for bypassing their "pay wall" was high enough.
First, a self-correction: Netscape did not produce open source products until it open-sourced Mozilla. Netscape Navigator was freeware: free to download and run, but not open source. I shouldn't have mentioned them, but my point still stands.
Second, it depends on what you define as success and failure. Netscape made its pre-IPO shareholders money if they timed their stock sales right. But the stock didn't go up because the company was profitable. It went up along with every other dot-com stock until the 2000-2002 crash, based on hopes and dreams, not fundamentals. The company never turned anywhere near close to a profit.
To me, a successful company is one that makes a sustainable profit based on its business fundamentals, not one that makes its founders and early investors rich in an investment bubble.
Netscape was actually selling a licence, which became free for endusers and eventually the entire browser was free, as the company concentrated on its Enterprise Server as a source of revenue. Netscape becoming freely available for endusers is pretty much what made the Web a mass phenomenon.
I assume you mean "sell it before you open source it."
If you found one willing buyer while it was still closed source, odds are there are others. Why rob yourself of additional income? Open sourcing does happen from closed source, but usually that's long after the income stream has exhausted itself (see, e.g., https://github.com/microsoft/ms-dos).
There's nothing stopping you, true. But I think you will find that nobody is going to buy software for whatever thousands of dollars it took you to make it. So the limitation in this case is a practical one, not a legal or moral one.
Otherwise you are no better than someone at an intersection with a bottle of Windex and a squeegee who, unsolicited, cleans a windshield and then demands the driver to pay for it.
This seems like a pet-peeve that's slipped through, because
1) It's really not; the FOSS developers never forced anyone to use their software, even if they're asking for payment for a product that was originally "marketed" as "free",
and
2) With the damage to society done by the work of many of the people in the tech industry and "respectable" white collar work in general, they should hope to be as virtuous as the window washers. Service done, pay for service, they go away and don't bother you for a while? No subscription shenanigans? Don't have to give them my credit card number? No annoying marketing emails? Not intentionally designing their service to be addictive? Geez. Adobe, Google, Facebook, Amazon employees make them look like saints. People give themselves way too much of a pass just because they sit in an air-conditioned office all day.
The evolutionarily stable strategy for a piece of software is "anybody may use this for anything, including commercially, for free." That's MIT, BSD, Apache, the licenses that ask for nothing. Every project that has tried to be a slightly less generous dove has lost to a project that stayed a full dove
Linux (GPLv2) seems like an obvious counterexample?
Arguably that happened because Linux was, in fact, the most generous option: the BSDs effectively refused to get contributors beyond their very small groups, and refused to incorporate patches to support "bad" hardware or nonfree blobs - meanwhile, Linux was built around modules that could contain anything regardless of license, and happily accepted new patches and unknown maintainers. You still see it today: Linux literally built its own distributed VCS (git), while some BSDs are still on the hyper-centralized CVS.
If there isn't an even more generous option is simply because building a mainstream OS is incredibly hard.
Other than charity and donations, the only two ways of getting paid for developing FOSS are: 1) support contracts and 2) crowdfunding the next release.
Digital goods live in a post-scarsity situation. Applying the same business model as real life products is crazy and it's the reason why we have Adobe&Co.
I'm not convinced a problem is actually here. I certainly wouldn't believe LLMs, an optional tool, make any part of this fundamentally worse. Maybe superficially for people who can't adapt.
Hard pass, thanks. Just, don't expect to get paid for maintaining open source projects.
It's easy. Everyone knows the deal going in, and if somehow you missed that you're not going to get paid for this and you want out at any time -- you just stop.
If you made something of value someone else who cares enough will pick it up. Or it can languish and the earth will keep spinning. It's fine.
Ruby Central, whose dependence on one big sponsor then produced the 2025 takeover
Ruby Central had two major sponsors at the time: Alpha Omega and Shopify. Also the events had much more to do with interpersonal conflicts than sponsors.
The named people we lost from the report: Sam was already way out the door. Andre was most of the way. Ellen wasn't doing that operational work. Deivid was only working on bundler and not the registry. Josef is the main operational loss, he removed himself. I'm unsure of which attack exactly Is being referenced, but Colby was promoted to full time (was planned before, just waiting on paperwork).
Other prior maintainers and security researchers did NOT leave. Maciej Mensfeld Was especially crucial. Jenny Shen. To name a few. These people are “the maintainers” too. We’ve (I’m a volunteer, came on in October 2025) brought on a number of in-kind engineers as well (companies donating engineer hours via letting employees work on company time).
I reached out to everyone unnamed that lost GitHub access. Of them, one asked for admin back (granted). None were active in operations.
Seldo’s overall point: about the fragility of all of this still stands. But I also believe the details and the nuance matter. I reached out to Laurie on bsky when this was first published but didn’t hear back.
One of the easiest ways to get paid for something is to to offer commercial support once something shifts to 'end of life' for community support. Can't get off of an old busted version - write a check for continued support! This sort of thing is reasonably easy to get through the accounting process.
Leaving a tip, paying for something free, trying to send money to a group that our infrastructure absolutely relies on - stupid hard. Commercial support, on the other hand, is very understandable to the bean counters.
after reading Ford Foundation document [0] i'll go beyond and purpose FOSS not only limit commercial use but also forking [1] as it seems we have an endless stream of libraries which do the same thing, scattering even more this "fragile" ecosystem which would benefit so much of big tech's evergreen
[0] https://www.fordfoundation.org/learning/library/research-rep... [1] https://happort.org/constraining_freedom
Being able to fork your own version is a desirable goal and by design. The original author can and will probably not want to take his project in all kind of imaginable directions.
That is "source available", that is a fine decition if you like it. Just don't call it FOSS.
I'm not sure it fits the free and/or libre software philosophy but I'm a big fan of releasing otherwise free and open source software as a paid version and with some exclusive QoL features in proprietary store fronts.
For example Krita. https://krita.org/en/download/ FOSS but you can buy it on Steam, Microsoft Store, Epic Store, and Apple Store. You get one exclusive feature, automatic updates (and more recently Steam Cloud sync support), and you also support the developers (on the other hand Valve, MS, Epic, and Apple also gets a cut too).
If you read for example the Steam reviews everyone points out that it's a free software but buying on Steam is also a good and very importantly straightforward way to support the devs + the platform itself has such a pull ("buying games you never play") that people buy it just for the case of having it in their library
https://store.steampowered.com/app/280680/Krita
Filebot used to be open source. I bought it on the AppStore, it was a way to support development and I figured it would give me easier updates that would just happen in the background.
When Apple moved to ARM, the App Store version lagged behind. An ARM version was available, but not in the App Store. I assume this is because that ARM version was a separate download instead of being a universal app, and the x86 app would run on everything (for now).
The app is no longer open source, and is paid. To get the ARM version (due to my stubbornness in not wanting to install Rosetta), I had to pay again just to get the app through a different means of distribution.
Too many run-ins with silly issues like this can really sour a person on the “free app in a paid store” model.
That can happen regardless of which storefront you use to buy a free app. It's more of a developer-specific nitpick than a chronic problem with FOSS and freeware.
If you're happy to sponsor the app's development, then owning the App Store version should make you feel proud. The developer is still able to make a living thanks to you, and they're offering extended support if you're unwilling to use a fork of the free version. A good example of this is Dwarf Fortress, which I have bought on Steam 3 times now so that I could gift it to two of my friends. God willing, nothing will prevent me from buying a 4th and 5th copy when Christmas rolls around.
Sounds like the problem is the app later became nonfree.
Not a very effective way to support the devs though: only about 60% of what you pay gets to the developers, because of Steam's cut and VAT.
Yet by the active unique user numbers they have estimated sold at least ~168k copies and maybe upwards ~500k https://steamdb.info/app/280680/charts/ And that's Steam alone. I'd be really curious compared to this how many people click on the Donate button on the Krita homepage.
That's a lot of purchases imo for a project like this. I'm kind of ambivalent about the store cuts but they give a huge enough exposure to any game or software.
UTM is another great example of this, which is basically a GUI for QEMU. They have a Mac App store $9.99 version and the free open source version:
https://github.com/utmapp/UTM
The free software philosophy aside, I feel like another problem is that once you start accepting payments then you start accepting various forms of responsibility/liability/accountability/etc. along with it. At a high enough price it'd become worth it, but that might not be anywhere near the price that your customers/users want to support you at.
Maybe but lots of $2 apps exist from random devs who don't take much responsibility.
Free open source -> compile it yourself
Affordable binaries and SASS are fine options that I’d like to see
I think I have donated more for Inkscape, Gimp, Firefox, and Libre Office than I ever spent on proprietary software. I also tend to buy paid versions of open-source apps in app stores, where available. It's great when a piece of open-source software has an easy donation link / button.
That said, I tend to trust all closed-source software significantly less, even if it's given away for free. Especially is it's given away for free.
I don't think this counts as an exclusive feature. But yes this pay for the binary model "libre non gratis" is a very good model.
I feel like the main issue with projects switching between a permissive and less permissive license and back is that starting out as fully permissive in the first place was the main error.
If everybody would just agree to start their open source code as something like source-available or OpenRAIL -requiring companies with more than $5M in annual revenue to pay for the work - we wouldn't be in this situation.
https://fair.io/
Yeah its a bait and switch. People want the social credit, early adoption, and community embrace of being open source, but they also want a captive business model.
It's not a bait and switch because the old version of the software that was released with the old license can still be used as such. If you call this bait and switch then I suppose this means that you somehow feel entitled to future versions of the software having the same license, forever.
That’s the thing with software, you can automate most future updates, with LLMs and whatnot.
Also, the initial software probably didn’t have a lot of known cves when it was sold.
They won't do this, because starting out as non-free doesn't get the same traction. Now that I think about it, it's basically a form of enshitification: draw people in with one deal, then after they're onboard, change it to something less favorable.
Why is it enshittification if you only have to pay when you have >$5M in revenue? Is your world so shit if you cross that threshold?
I think the issue is more on how you audit such things. Governments struggle (partially by design, but still) to get proper audits on who uses what and how much money they make.
The theory is great, but I'm unsure how you execute this.
Well, that's even more reason to not complain about it.
The usual pushback I get from FOSS zealots is that any time I mention things like money, popularity, increasing adoption etc. they just say none of that matters because it's "not a project goal."
In fact, often they don't even want money to be a thing at all, they think capitalism is inherently evil (cough innovation) and would prefer if everyone was just poor and lived in the woods or something.
Sorry... I like the world to be a little more interesting than that.
These are the currencies of the VC world, and many open source developers don't release their work for those reasons (myself included, limited though my contributions are). It seems strange to deride them as making the world uninteresting because of this.
Modern society has done a wonderful job proving that sentiment right. I can't blame them.
I'd prefer if everyone had proper control over the tools they used. Whether they choose to live in the woods to use such tools or use them to make society a worse place is the double edged of 'free' (as in freedom)
I completely understand those skeptical about perverse incentives from not making software 'free' (as in beer). It shouldn't be a surprise that adding monetary inventice changes the entire incentive structure.
The financialisation of everything is, frankly, fairly toxic, so it's reasonable argument.
I’m not sure who is worse, the people who want everyone to be poor and live in the woods, or the ones who want to monetize every human interaction until you need a microtransaction to unlock your front door.
Maybe there’s a balance to be struck.
This article is full of LLMisms, which is to be expected but maybe it wouldn't be 5000 words and wouldn't need this disclaimer if they wrote it themselves
The only llmism I sensed is the use of "load bearing". Im usually queasy after reading llm slop, and stop before the end. This didn't have that effect.
Maybe the llms are getting better, but either way, this article reads like a real hunan write the whole thing.
This article feels like it was written by a human who has just read to much llm writing
Humans don't write things like: "Now, the popular way to tell this story is "the system is breaking," and I don't think that's right, and the distinction matters."
It felt like unedited, unstyled Claude output. e.g. "No, and the difference is the important bit."
Before LLMs no load was ever borne
Stop whining about it, the constant whining is worse than the LLM prose
It's really not, actually. Often I read the comments before the article and getting a head's up that the article is slop is invaluable.
It's not only not 'worse than the LLM prose', it's a community service!
I don't know about you, but I personally really appreciate when people warn me in advance that something is going to be a waste of time.
"and I don't think that's right, and the distinction matters" Yeah right. lol
While I’m usually one to also get annoyed at uncurated slop, this doesn’t strike me in any way as LLM text, and likely something the author meant in earnest. I reads lot of LLM text. What part about it appeared generated to you?
From my perspective the piece was well structured, paced and thought through (and yes, a bit long)
The whole paragraph titled "Isn't this just Tidelift again?" is exactly how Claude describes something it is excited about.
How is this a LLM output? A LLM can easily write out those 5000 words.
Isn't this similar to the anaconda model? (Except they keep the money instead of distributing it.)
Depending on how you count, in my research group we are like 10 and in my whoooole university we are like 60.000 employees. When they went from free to restriced for big organizations I just uninstaled it.
Yes, but anaconda has a free competitor (pypi).
If pypi started charging too, you'd have nowhere else to go.
You seem to be forgetting the most important word in FOSS..
For them it is not the most important word, apparently.
But it is one of the words.
It can still be free for most people but paid for companies who make >$5M revenue.
Conditionally free is also free.
The Free in Foss is not "Free as in beer".
No, but "free as in speech" effectively precludes making money from sales of the software. As soon as you sell it to one person, that person can give it to others for less than he paid you (all the way down to free), so nobody has a reason to pay you any more. There's a reason FOSS survives on donations or service, rather than selling copies of the software.
I think I'm starting to forget, but could someone maybe tell me what the F in FOSS stands for?
"Free as in speech, not free as in beer."
I'm not reading an AI slop article, but there's nothing in either the Free Software Definition or the Open Source Definition restricting the selling of software. It does prevent you from restricting people from sharing that software once they've bought it, but you could always use a threshold pledge system to ensure you get enough money before releasing anything:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_pledge_system
As I understand it, if you have the first, the second follows from it. So it's effectively the same.
Not the same at all. Free as in beer means you get nothing. Free as in speech allows you to get as much money as you can using a threshold pledge system. This isn't just theoretical: the famous 3D modelling software Blender was released this way, becoming Free Software only after a €100,000 payment.
Sorry, I phrased it badly. I meant that in practice free-as-in-speech implies free-as-in-beer for copies: once anyone can redistribute the code.
"We encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. ... So if you are redistributing copies of free software, you might as well charge a substantial fee and make some money. Redistributing free software is a good and legitimate activity; if you do it, you might as well make a profit from it. ... Distributing free software is an opportunity to raise funds for development. Don't waste it!" https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
Indeed! While reading the original post, I was reminded of the old essays where RMS made it abundantly clear that charging for delivery media was absolutely ok - and if you wanted GNU updates, you should send in the stamps necessary to send them back to you.
Maintaining a popular registry is very hard work, hard enough that commercial entities would rather pay than having to do it themselves. It is literally SaaS. It could absolutely be monetized for the common good - although the gamification worry is real, and the governance would be really difficult to defend from sharks. But there might be clever ways to fix those issues.
The one thing you cannot fix is the cross-planet level playing field that registries provide. Today, a small African company can pull from a registry more or less in the same way as large US corporations. If you put a toll booth up, the toll will soon be too high for people in various parts of the world.
The reason I dislike this is because of the game it creates. Let's say we have someone who developed a small, well-used dependency (say: xz) but there is now incentive to be "in the dependency chain." xz is open, LLMs are really good at stealing/recreating; what stops someone from publishing rxz (maybe a rust port, maybe a gnu-r port, maybe it's "Really fast" xz, maybe it's just hoping for a typo in a registry.) This new dependency adds very little over the original xz and xz could have just used a simple PR.
On the other side of things, does accepting a PR from someone grant the author the ability to collect royalties for that software project? If so, how would you quantify that? LOC seems like a quick but really bad answer for what it is incentivizing.
For many, the entire point of "F" in "FOSS" is not getting tangled up in this kind of mess. I personally would never want to add "am I opening myself up to a lawsuit if I don't pay someone for their PR" to enter my calculus of accepting a PR. Especially if this is because I reject payment at all on a project.
Finally, if a company/employee submits code to FOSS under this model, do they now expect a return?
This new dependency adds very little over the original xz and xz could have just used a simple PR.
I kind of like the incentives created by this competition. This "what if someone takes your software, adds one feature, and sells it" argument has been made many times and I think the answer is that you, as the original maintainer, are in the best position to add features and if you squander that position you deserve to lose.
Seriously imagine the consequences of this "eat or be eaten" approach. What it incentivizes is not feature development per se, but fragmentation for the sake of it. This in turn leads to less attentation toward maintaining the shared base of the fragmented forks, as it has been superseded with features X and Y in different, probably incompatible forks.
My point is that the original maintainer can defuse the forks by including the same features. That leaves users no reason to bother using the forks.
how about making money from something else like hardware, to fund software (almost like IP is a fiction and people should be making money from tangible things rather than info)
I'm sure AI can also brainstorm more ideas for (F)OSS business models today
If you want people to pay you for your software, stop writing it for free. Conversely, if you write it for free, don't expect people to pay you for it. Otherwise you are no better than someone at an intersection with a bottle of Windex and a squeegee who, unsolicited, cleans a windshield and then demands the driver to pay for it.
The original authors of Free Software and open source were career academics and others who were paid to do other things, or were sponsored by scientific and defense research grants. I don't know how anyone got the nutty idea that you could make money on FOSS itself. Practically every time someone has tried to make money on FOSS it has failed.
(Edit: this comment previously ended with "...from Netscape on down.")
In what world was Netscape a failure? Made some people an awful lot of money and then gave us Firefox... Pretty far from failure
Netscape basically died and was replaced by Firefox which doesn't/can't effectively charge users for the software so instead makes money by selling default search engine, etc.
Netscape existed as the internet was coming into existence. You used to have to buy a physical copy in the store to install it. People barely knew how to use their computers so the activation cost for bypassing their "pay wall" was high enough.
Netscape was included free with almost every ISP installation disk.
First, a self-correction: Netscape did not produce open source products until it open-sourced Mozilla. Netscape Navigator was freeware: free to download and run, but not open source. I shouldn't have mentioned them, but my point still stands.
Second, it depends on what you define as success and failure. Netscape made its pre-IPO shareholders money if they timed their stock sales right. But the stock didn't go up because the company was profitable. It went up along with every other dot-com stock until the 2000-2002 crash, based on hopes and dreams, not fundamentals. The company never turned anywhere near close to a profit.
To me, a successful company is one that makes a sustainable profit based on its business fundamentals, not one that makes its founders and early investors rich in an investment bubble.
Netscape was actually selling a licence, which became free for endusers and eventually the entire browser was free, as the company concentrated on its Enterprise Server as a source of revenue. Netscape becoming freely available for endusers is pretty much what made the Web a mass phenomenon.
There's nothing stopping you from charging money for FOSS software. Sell the first one for as much as it cost to write it.
I assume you mean "sell it before you open source it."
If you found one willing buyer while it was still closed source, odds are there are others. Why rob yourself of additional income? Open sourcing does happen from closed source, but usually that's long after the income stream has exhausted itself (see, e.g., https://github.com/microsoft/ms-dos).
There's nothing stopping you, true. But I think you will find that nobody is going to buy software for whatever thousands of dollars it took you to make it. So the limitation in this case is a practical one, not a legal or moral one.
This seems like a pet-peeve that's slipped through, because
1) It's really not; the FOSS developers never forced anyone to use their software, even if they're asking for payment for a product that was originally "marketed" as "free",
and
2) With the damage to society done by the work of many of the people in the tech industry and "respectable" white collar work in general, they should hope to be as virtuous as the window washers. Service done, pay for service, they go away and don't bother you for a while? No subscription shenanigans? Don't have to give them my credit card number? No annoying marketing emails? Not intentionally designing their service to be addictive? Geez. Adobe, Google, Facebook, Amazon employees make them look like saints. People give themselves way too much of a pass just because they sit in an air-conditioned office all day.
The lions share of the packages used by company X should get the lions share of their subscription too. This is where music subscription has failed.
Linux (GPLv2) seems like an obvious counterexample?
Arguably that happened because Linux was, in fact, the most generous option: the BSDs effectively refused to get contributors beyond their very small groups, and refused to incorporate patches to support "bad" hardware or nonfree blobs - meanwhile, Linux was built around modules that could contain anything regardless of license, and happily accepted new patches and unknown maintainers. You still see it today: Linux literally built its own distributed VCS (git), while some BSDs are still on the hyper-centralized CVS.
If there isn't an even more generous option is simply because building a mainstream OS is incredibly hard.
Change the GPL and make the GPL only apply to NATURAL HUMANS and NOT CORPORATE HUMANS.
If the corporates want to use it, they can make a licensing agreement and put money into a trust of all who support it.
They don't want to pay? Too fucking bad.
Other than charity and donations, the only two ways of getting paid for developing FOSS are: 1) support contracts and 2) crowdfunding the next release.
Digital goods live in a post-scarsity situation. Applying the same business model as real life products is crazy and it's the reason why we have Adobe&Co.
I'm not convinced a problem is actually here. I certainly wouldn't believe LLMs, an optional tool, make any part of this fundamentally worse. Maybe superficially for people who can't adapt.
“we can force them to pay for free”
Hard pass, thanks. Just, don't expect to get paid for maintaining open source projects.
It's easy. Everyone knows the deal going in, and if somehow you missed that you're not going to get paid for this and you want out at any time -- you just stop.
If you made something of value someone else who cares enough will pick it up. Or it can languish and the earth will keep spinning. It's fine.
I'm not going to force anybody to help me pay my rent, but.. I'd be glad to put your name on my wall of pizza shamelessly if you do. ;-)
https://brynet.ca/wallofpizza.html
Some pedantic points:
Ruby Central had two major sponsors at the time: Alpha Omega and Shopify. Also the events had much more to do with interpersonal conflicts than sponsors.
My report: https://rubycentral.org/news/rubygems-fracture-incident-repo...
That is the GitHub only portion, but the AWS root happened immediately after/during and has its own timeline https://rubycentral.org/news/rubygems-org-aws-root-access-ev...
The named people we lost from the report: Sam was already way out the door. Andre was most of the way. Ellen wasn't doing that operational work. Deivid was only working on bundler and not the registry. Josef is the main operational loss, he removed himself. I'm unsure of which attack exactly Is being referenced, but Colby was promoted to full time (was planned before, just waiting on paperwork).
Other prior maintainers and security researchers did NOT leave. Maciej Mensfeld Was especially crucial. Jenny Shen. To name a few. These people are “the maintainers” too. We’ve (I’m a volunteer, came on in October 2025) brought on a number of in-kind engineers as well (companies donating engineer hours via letting employees work on company time).
I reached out to everyone unnamed that lost GitHub access. Of them, one asked for admin back (granted). None were active in operations.
Seldo’s overall point: about the fragility of all of this still stands. But I also believe the details and the nuance matter. I reached out to Laurie on bsky when this was first published but didn’t hear back.
One of the easiest ways to get paid for something is to to offer commercial support once something shifts to 'end of life' for community support. Can't get off of an old busted version - write a check for continued support! This sort of thing is reasonably easy to get through the accounting process.
Leaving a tip, paying for something free, trying to send money to a group that our infrastructure absolutely relies on - stupid hard. Commercial support, on the other hand, is very understandable to the bean counters.