Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
Open Source Programming

Is It Time For Open Source to Start Charging For Access? (theregister.com) 97

Posted by EditorDavid from the what-comes-after-open dept.
"It's time to charge for access," argues a new opinion piece at The Register. Begging billion-dollar companies to fund open source projects just isn't enough, writes long-time tech reporter Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: Screw fair. Screw asking for dimes. You can't live off one-off charity donations... Depending on what people put in a tip jar is no way to fund anything of value... [A]ccording to a 2024 Tidelift maintainer report, 60 percent of open source maintainers are unpaid, and 60 percent have quit or considered quitting, largely due to burnout and lack of compensation. Oh, and of those getting paid, only 26 percent earn more than $1,000 a year for their work. They'd be better paid asking "Would you like fries with that?" at your local McDonald's...

Some organizations do support maintainers, for example, there's HeroDevs and its $20 million Open Source Sustainability Fund. Its mission is to pay maintainers of critical, often end-of-life open source components so they can keep shipping patches without burning out. Sentry's Open Source Pledge/Fund has given hundreds of thousands of dollars per year directly to maintainers of the packages Sentry depends on. Sentry is one of the few vendors that systematically maps its dependency tree and then actually cuts checks to the people maintaining that stack, as opposed to just talking about "giving back."

Sentry is on to something. We have the Linux Foundation to manage commercial open source projects, the Apache Foundation to oversee its various open source programs, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) to coordinate open source licenses, and many more for various specific projects. It's time we had an organization with the mission of ensuring that the top programmers and maintainers of valuable open source projects get a cut of the tech billionaire pie.

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.
One possible future... Bruce Perens wrote the original Open Source definition in 1997, and now proposes a not-for-profit corporation developing "the Post Open Collection" of software, distributing its licensing fees to developers while providing services like user support, documentation, hardware-based authentication for developers, and even help with government compliance and lobbying.

Is It Time For Open Source to Start Charging For Access? More | Reply

Is It Time For Open Source to Start Charging For Access?

Comments Filter:

  • Why now? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Sunday March 29, 2026 @07:50PM (#66068046)

    This has literally been the case now for 40 years, and yet the open source movement is stronger than ever. So why now? Also charging for access? Stallman will rip your balls off.

    • This has literally been the case now for 40 years, and yet the open source movement is stronger than ever. So why now? Also charging for access? Stallman will rip your balls off.

      Citation needed.

      My current citation is Microsoft Secrets by Cusumano and Selby. Kind of old, so maybe someone can say how much things have changed over the years, but the point is that they are too optimized about getting more money. And they dominate the real world.

      OSS is "stronger than ever"? In which dimension? I can't think of one. Even programmer satisfaction.

      Me? I'm still hung up on the notion of a better structured charitable approach. Recovering costs, where the costs include appropriate payments

      • OSS is "stronger than ever"? In which dimension? I can't think of one. Even programmer satisfaction.

        You can't think of one? Really? It's early and my coffee hasn't kicked in but let me rattle off the most blatantly obvious:
        Availability - More software than every before.
        Developer support - More tools, utilities than ever before.
        End user impact - Virtually every single person in the world who is using tech has some built on open source.
        Audience - Open source is no longer limited to power users.
        End use products - There are more devices than ever before available which run open source software, not just built

        • Ideologues who think they help open source by placing demands on developers are hilarious.

          https://users.rust-lang.org/t/... [rust-lang.org]

          "You guys need to perform work I'm not paying you for on MY terms!"

          If I wanted money for my open source contributions, I would have asked for it. If the idea of somebody else making a billion dollars off of your work and paying you zero doesn't sit well with you, then simply say so in your license. Be sure to tell the pseudonymous contributors what their share of that is while you're at

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by shanen ( 462549 )

          NAK

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Temkin ( 112574 )

      Stallman will rip your balls off.

      Funding via pay per view? There's an Idiocracy joke in there somewhere...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by SumDog ( 466607 )
      Stallman has never taken issues with people charging for open source software, or making money off it in other ways, so long as the code maintained the four software freedoms.

      • Stallman literally developed a license that promoted the allowed use of something making cost primarily optional. Stallman never had issues with charging, but he very much rallied against that charge gatekeeping.

        TFS postulates a version of gatekeeping because the voluntary contributions are apparently not sufficient.

    • > Stallman will rip your balls off.

      No, Stallman will not rip your balls off. Stallman never **ever** campaigned against for-profit, commercial software. He continues to campaign against **proprietary** software. The fact that it's difficult to demand money for writing free software is a side-effect of one of the freedoms that Stallman advocates: the freedom to use the software. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ [wikipedia.org] The_Free_Software_Definition#The_Four_Essential_Freedoms )

      • What we are talking about literally goes against some of those freedoms. Specifically Freedom 2 and Freedom 3. You can't be free to distribute if a monetary contribution is used for gatekeeping.

      • Semantics much? Thats like saying I support free cheeseburgers for everyone, but I never advocated for making it hard to keep a burger joint open.

    • > yet the open source movement is stronger than ever

      Really?

      The major projects are corporatized like never before, with Google, IBM, and Canonical basically providing most of the funding and about 100% of the steering of the GNU/Linux ecosystem.

      Smaller projects like Zimbra, Elastisearch, et al, suddenly turn closed source overnight as they become unsustainable as open source projects.

      What was once a massive movement to put software in the hands of developers and users has been entirely coopted by massive

    • It costs time to develop software. It costs time to support software. It costs time to fix bugs. It costs money to lease server space and provide bandwidth. Why not charge for support, documentation, and feature requests? Keep binaries and source are available.

    • I'm guessing that AI is rapidly replacing open source projects that require a lot of work to tailor to a specific need. Whatever exists as open source has already been assimilated into AI databases. AI knows about open source projects and refers you to them but it wouldn't take much to train AI to reinvent the wheel but not just any wheel. The exact type of wheel you need for what you're working on.

    • Those who used to be ideologically motivated (for freedom) lost their first love (programming for fun) and have grown resentful of the tech billionaire sociopaths who have benefited from their work. And instead of fighting the emerging techno-feudalism (like they would have done when they were younger), they want to be cut in.

    • Because the megacorps want competition that charges for access, instead of competition that makes their product have to compete with free.
    • Stallman won't mind, he's always said Open Source is free, as in beer. We have to stop associating Open Source with Libre Source, since giving your software out for free, is different from publishing the source code. I've said many times I support Open Source, but I don't think you have to give your work away from free, you have every right to charge, but the user has the right to verify.

      I probably give LibreOffice more money in donations a year, than a basic MS 365 license would cost me, and that's f

      • The thing about free as in beer is that you're fundamentally within your right to give that beer to someone else. There's a difference between charging for a product and gatekeeping its use. Any attempt to gatekeep fundamentally corrects itself and often comes close to sinking the original project.

        Just look to examples like Elasticsearch. Put up a paygate and find your project forked (it was free as in beer after all) and watch yourself slowly slip into irrelevance.
        It's just one example of many which have f

        • You're free to know what's in the beer, you're free to enjoy and use the beer, and you're free to give away the beer, but, the moment you want to duplicate that beer that's an issue. Again, I don't like to group Open-Source with Libre-Source, and Open-Audit, and all the other ways you can express the licensing / source model.

          I think the best thing we can do is to stop over extending Open-Source, it's being misused a thousand ways, and causing more confusion than it's worth. I believe in Open-Source, an

  • I don't disagree. But... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Petersko ( 564140 ) on Sunday March 29, 2026 @07:58PM (#66068058)

    For their money, large companies want the proverbial throat to choke - even when they've never successfully choked the throats they've paid for. The footprint of open source in these companies often grew through bottom up implementation. The moment that somebody has to pay an ongoing support contract, it will become a financial and strategic decision. That means vendor management, tech and vendor downselection, risk analysis... the best-effort maintainer isn't going to fly.

    If I were a betting man, I think the result would be a decline in usage - and that might be fine. If the model isn't working, that definitely needs addressing. But the companies most able to afford licensing are probably the ones least likely to pay for it.

  • Non-commercial use only (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Todd Knarr ( 15451 ) on Sunday March 29, 2026 @08:09PM (#66068072) Homepage

    Maybe the legal experts could sit down and work out how to modify licenses (including the GPL/LGPL) to be for non-commercial use only? As long as an entity wasn't making money using FOSS, it could use it just like now. Individuals and non-commercial projects wouldn't be affected. But if you're a business making money using FOSS? Not without paying for it you're not. Yes, this would go against the free-software principles. But principles don't pay the bills every month, and none of these changes would prevent anyone from staying with the existing licenses if they wanted to.

    The first thing I think of as a problem would be a company setting up a separate entity that wouldn't make money, just make services available to the company using FOSS to get around the fees. The trick to preventing this would be to phrase the terms so that that entity truly had to pay it's own bills without having the company using it's services pay anything either directly or indirectly. Not even by doing things like providing hosting "free". I'd have to sit down with a bunch of rules lawyers and game out all the ways to funnel money into that entity and how to block them, but what's life without a little challenge?

    • Maybe not.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Chozabu ( 974192 )
      QT does a dual-licencing system, you have to pay if you don't want to share back via the GPL. And there is also the AGPL - which could work well in dual licencing for services?

      Not quite the same, but there's some overlap in what it solves.

    • non-commercial = not Free. period.

      Freedom 0 in GPL is "The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose"

      • Re:Non-commercial use only (Score:4, Insightful)

        by serafean ( 4896143 ) on Monday March 30, 2026 @05:51AM (#66068554)

        The article is about Open Source, of which Free Software is just a subset.
        Think all the BSD, MIT, Apache licenses which corpos simply bundle in and are done with it. Those IMO should have a non-commercial use clause.

        I do also believe the GPL family of licenses does put enough restrictions on use that a "non commercial clause" isn't warranted in them.

        • "Think all the BSD, MIT, Apache licenses which corpos simply bundle in and are done with it. Those IMO should have a non-commercial use clause."

          And they would get a fraction of the use they currently get, meaning other more permissively-licensed alternatives would be used instead.

    • Maybe the legal experts could sit down and work out how to modify licenses (including the GPL/LGPL) to be for non-commercial use only?

      That's easy. You just put "for non-commercial use only" in the license and give the license a new name. Then no corporate entities use it and therefore they never give anything back to the project and it dies. Mission accomplished?

    • This is already an option. For those who want to sell their software, they can do so, and make it free for noncommercial use.

      Microsoft does this today, with SQL Server and Visual Studio. Both are free for noncommercial use.

      Lots of other titles do the same. This is *not* open source.

  • That was always one of the suspension of disbelief breaking aspects of Star Trek, too. As if anyone would deal with all the responsibilities and risks involved in being a starship crew member when you could just fake the entire experience in a holosuite instead.

    Of course, open source developers working on their own time have the worst of both worlds - along with the rest of us, they're not living in a Star Trek post-scarcity society, and they're also not getting paid. I've always been kind of surprised th

    • That was always one of the suspension of disbelief breaking aspects of Star Trek, too. As if anyone would deal with all the responsibilities and risks involved in being a starship crew member when you could just fake the entire experience in a holosuite instead.

      Which is more believable? Simulating real life in a holodeck or the Goddess of Empathy?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bahbus ( 1180627 )

      That was always one of the suspension of disbelief breaking aspects of Star Trek, too. As if anyone would deal with all the responsibilities and risks involved in being a starship crew member when you could just fake the entire experience in a holosuite instead.

      Some people absolutely would want that responsibility and risk. But also, Starfleet is a military organization. They don't get a real choice in where they get assigned, outside of a few exceptions.

      • Some people absolutely would want that responsibility and risk. But also, Starfleet is a military organization. They don't get a real choice in where they get assigned, outside of a few exceptions.

        That just moves the question - you're in what is (at least through TNG-era eyes) a post-scarcity society. Why are you signing up for the military, to go get sent off random places and get eaten by negative space wedgies, when you could just replicate another bag of Cheetos?

        • Because most people on Earth in Star Trek moved past that "F* yours, Got mine" mentality after the Third World War. Granted, there's outliers, and the border systems very much still engage in trade for currency, but something about "nearly destroying your entire species" tends to stick with them.

          Also, there's a limit on just how much one can vege out before wanting the real thing. Fame is also a motivation. As is power itself. (Many things in Star Trek's UFoP are directly influenced by the actions of Star

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Bahbus ( 1180627 )

          Why are you signing up for the military

          Why does anyone sign up for the military ever? Scarcity and money may have no longer been a thing, but people still worked jobs.

          The Enterprise, and it's antics, was not "normal" for Starfleet, so it wasn't like it was happening everywhere.

    • Yeah, but I'm gonna say nobody asked Joe to write code for free .. he has his reasons .. example rosegarden midi sequencer .. I do some testing for it, the lead programmer and I go back and forth ... we're musicians .. it's driven by "passion".. for sure no money is involved .

      But I think the larger issue , if opensource was somehow administered by an oversight body, how would it not turn into a shitshow like Mozilla, for instance? Or look how systemd was planted into good sw, Debian, and now the most popul

  • If payment's required to access open-source sw (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Sunday March 29, 2026 @08:35PM (#66068108)

    ... then that project is really can't be described as open source anymore.

    • "Open Source" has been co-opted by tech companies for 25 years by now. The phrase no longer means what it used to mean, and the current generation of developers is uneducated in the finer points.

      Can the community get back to the old ways? Perhaps, but I don't see an easy path from here. The GPLv3, which was rejected, was the strongest attempt at protecting common code from direct corporate exploitation. The BSD style licences were never going to achieve that kind of protection, and they clearly haven't.

      W

      • The phrase no longer means what it used to mean[...]

        It means what it always has. It never meant the same as "free software", not now, not 25 years ago. It always meant " as much of 'free' as we need to in order to make corporate software development cheaper, while keeping as many options open as was can to close it up and charge for access down the line".

        It just wasn't always this obvious (to some).

        • Re: If payment's required to access open-source sw (Score:4, Informative)

          by Digital Avatar ( 752673 ) on Monday March 30, 2026 @04:30AM (#66068476) Journal
          Open Source literally meant just what it says on the tin until the OSI showed up to rebadge it so they could resell Free Software to silicon valley oligarchs. This is well trodden ground. [arp242.net]

          • Nope. That was just by accident.

            If it had been to mean hat it said on the tin, there wouldn't have been any necessity to introduce the term in the first place, as Free Software haf already been around fpr 15-ish years at that point.

            I was around and... uhm... awakened, for lack of a better term, when ESR and the like introduced "OpenSource" to produce more corporate appeal.

            There was 0 reason to do that solely to describe GPL'ed software, and every reason to avoid philosophical concepts like "freedom" when ta

            • Yeah, it had been around for 15 years and made few inroads into corporate america because they got hung up on the "free" in "free software". That was the whole point. If free software could've been marketed directly to corporate america there wouldn't have been a need for another term at all.

              • corporate america [] got hung up on the "free" in "free software".

                I agree with your words, but I'm not sure we mean the same thing. To be clear, corporate America didn't get hung up on the free as in "beer" part. It got up on the philosophical implications of free as in "speech". No more lock-ins, no more EULA that can restrict use of the software you paid for, no more "you're going tonuse what we decide is beat for you and you're going to like it", no more forced upgrades to versions that bring barely anything to the table besides new licensing costs and new bugs etc.

      • Nothing has been co-opted. Open source hasn't changed, and corporations building their world on open source largely are actively following licenses. The way they were envisaged.

        We are now well into the era of stealing source code for profit, and routine AI plagiarism.

        Now speaking of co-opting, what part of Open Source (old ways or current ways) give you any right to gatekeep what happens with the code you publish? If you give something away it literally can't be stolen (leaving aside your conflation of copyright infringement and stealing, shame on you, your UID is low enough that you will have be

        • Open Source has changed radically.

          Consider how IBM / Red Hat are actively overriding [opencoreventures.com] the licenses of the software they distribute.

          Consider how coding LLMs copy without attribution open source snippets found by their company spiders. Are there license terms? Yes. Are they being ignored on an industrial scale? Yes.

          Consider how Google locks up Android code by making closed source play services effectively essential. This is straight out of the Microsoft playbook when they made IE deliberately essential t

          • Consider how IBM / Red Hat are actively overriding the licenses of the software they distribute.

            This is a real problem.

            Consider how coding LLMs copy without attribution open source snippets found by their company spiders.

            This is also a real problem.

            Consider how Google locks up Android code by making closed source play services effectively essential.

            This is not a real problem. Google gives away the OSS code as required. You are free to use it as you like. If you don't like being hobbled by play store requirements you can use the other pieces to build a system which isn't like that. There are already systems which do this which prove it.

            Consider how web sites use modified open source tooling without sharing their added code back.

            That's why we now have the AGPL. You're free to use it for your projects.

            We live in a different world.

            The web site model is the same as the microcomputer or mainframe or SaaS model (which is old AF,

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by pjt33 ( 739471 )

      Depends on the model. Wix (the Windows installer builder, not the website builder) has switched to a model whereby the source is always available for free but they charge for compiled binaries.

    • ... then that project is really can't be described as open source anymore.

      Yeah, this whole argument boils down to the same old, same old when it comes to modern society. Everything, literally *EVERYTHING* must be driven by greed. It's all about the money, and even the nicest things we have must be turned for profit or it has no value.

      I'd be sad to see the spirit of open source get turned into yet another greed inflection point, but not surprised. We've spent too many years concentrating on promoting greed as our only moral code, our only ethical guidepost, our only true god. We c

  • Huh (Score:2, Troll)

    by quonset ( 4839537 )

    The same people who steal music, software, and videos now want others to pay for their work.

    • The same people who want copyright to be fair want copyright to be fair.

    • The same people who steal music, software, and videos now want others to pay for their work.

      If it was stealing, they wouldn't have had to come up with an entirely new body of law about it.

  • Time for a tax. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by pirodude ( 54707 ) on Sunday March 29, 2026 @09:05PM (#66068128)

    Vaughan-Nichols is right about the problem and wrong about the solution. Voluntary pledge funds and tip jars have existed for a decade and the 60% unpaid figure hasn't moved. Sentry is admirable precisely because it's an exception, the model doesn't scale because it depends on individual corporate virtue, which is in shorter supply than VC funding.

    Perens' Post Open licensing approach is interesting but creates a two-tier ecosystem: "free for individuals, pay for commercial use" sounds clean until you realize it breaks the fundamental property that made open source eat the world. The moment a license is commercial-use-restricted, it's not open source, it's source-available, and enterprises will treat it accordingly (avoid it, fork it before the license change, or just use the last MIT-licensed version forever).

    What's actually needed: mandatory contribution structured as a fee, not a license restriction. Here's one way to do it. Small flat fee on all US commercial revenue above $5M (the entire world runs on OSS, everyone pays to maintain it), larger marginal fee on companies whose products directly incorporate OSS. Fees flow into a scoring-based royalty pool: your project's share is proportional to how much commercial revenue depends on it, revenue-weighted so a hedge fund running its entire risk engine on a niche numerical library counts for more than fifty startups using the same package for weekend side projects. Maintainers register and claim their allocation like music royalties, no government agency decides who gets hired, just checks cut proportional to actual commercial stakes.

    The core insight: you can't solve a collective action problem with voluntary action. You solve it by making the externality visible in the price.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by pjt33 ( 739471 )

      Then you get USians complaining about the rest of the world freeloading and non-USians complaining that they're not getting paid.

    • By the time you've paid for the bureaucracy, the court-cases arguing the accuracy of the scoring and the correct way to weight, and sorted out the fact that it needs to be global, you've got less money to give to the projects than they get now.

    • Perens' Post Open licensing approach is interesting but creates a two-tier ecosystem: "free for individuals, pay for commercial use" sounds clean until you realize it breaks the fundamental property that made open source eat the world.

      This is on brand for Perens, who was part of the OSI effort to take over the whole idea of "Open Source".

      What's actually needed: mandatory contribution structured as a fee, not a license restriction. Here's one way to do it. Small flat fee on all US commercial revenue above $5M (the entire world runs on OSS, everyone pays to maintain it), larger marginal fee on companies whose products directly incorporate OSS.

      Holy shit just get it from the general fund, spending shitloads figuring out who pays how much and arguing about it in court (which is what will happen, guaranteed) is dumb when we all benefit from foss.

  • Commercial access should definitely be charged, either in terms of money or developer contributions. If others want to profit off my work, they should have to share them with me, fairly

  • We must normalize paying for worth (Score:3)

    by TheReaperD ( 937405 ) on Sunday March 29, 2026 @10:04PM (#66068192)

    Would an executive at any big tech company go to a nice restaurant and not tip the waiter? Of course not, because it is expected for them to pay for the worth.

    This needs to be the case in open source. To not frame it as “donations,” but that worth should be paid for.

    But how do we start this? I would love to find like-minded folks to help build a Pay It for Worth campaign. We get businesses to sign a pledge to pay for worth and give them advertising so that we get customers to see who isn't freeloading. And we get a grassroots way for small businesses to take paying for open source to be a legitimate business expense they can deduct on their taxes, unlike the current donation limit they currently have to deal with.

    • But how do we start this? I would love to find like-minded folks to help build a Pay It for Worth campaign. We get businesses to sign a pledge to pay for worth and give them advertising so that we get customers to see who isn't freeloading. And we get a grassroots way for small businesses to take paying for open source to be a legitimate business expense they can deduct on their taxes, unlike the current donation limit they currently have to deal with.

      Maybe start with a public leaderboard by projects simply naming annual and historical FUNDING.yaml the way AUTHORS, etc.are tracked. With a standard, machine-readable format totals could be added up across the ecosystem.

      Naming the good actors provides a carrot and stick. Maybe if practice grows to the point people want to game it, this non-profit people dream of could step in and do the labor to vet, track, and vouch for contents of a formal funding registry.

    • Would an executive at any big tech company go to a nice restaurant and not tip the waiter? Of course not, because it is expected for them to pay for the worth.

      Comparing this to tipping is the wrong approach because tipping is fucking stupid. The problem with your analogy is that the executive are going to a for-profit business that isn't paying its employees properly. That's not the same as using open source software.

      Better analogy: It's Monday. You went into the office. Sharleen brought in some cake. Did you tip her for the work she did voluntarily? Why not you monster!

      • Comparing this to tipping is the wrong approach because tipping is fucking stupid. The problem with your analogy is that the executive are going to a for-profit business that isn't paying its employees properly.

        I thought it was a stupid analogy until I read that. This is essentially what's happening, who's working where is the only difference. The executives love it specifically because they don't have to pay the people doing the work. We do need to solve that problem. If we're not going to solve it with UBI, which remains the simplest way to solve a long list of problems like this, then it's just going to need to be solved in some other way.

        But just like best solution to the tipped wage problem is to eliminate it

        • No, it's not what is happening, the analogy breaks down because it expects a voluntary contribution from someone outside of the organisation. Nothing about a waitress tipping at any point involves someone doing voluntary work with an expectation of variable income. A waitress is an employee of an organisation, the fact that organisation pays them incorrectly is not analogous to someone not paying for open source software.

          If you insist on staying with food and not liking the cake approach, consider maybe som

        • But, until UBI becomes reality, we have to find other ways to pay people for good things that the oligarchs don't want.

  • so literally closing the source, or do you not know what the words mean

  • Honestly this is the stupidest article i've ever seen. The way to get open source maintainers paid is to make them the only source, ie to make open source software the only legal software. Which is a good idea anyway, because you are NOT a temporarily displaced millionaire, and the world would be better for it in ways you can't even imagine right now.

  • Concerned that the reason we keep doing open source is because we believe in access.
    The false tradeoff there, is believing that access and exploitation are necessary corollaries. And I don't think they are.
    It's a tough balance, and open source licenses have clearly failed us here.
    But I'm not sure where to go with it. Shared source might be better, like the Mongo license, or something like it. The Kimi2 license had the right idea.
    On the other hand, when you leave the open source path, you pay by losing acces

  • Don't get me wrong. I am not complaining about the idea open source developers being paid.

    But very few people use open source, in any serious way. If they had to pay for it, a lot less people would use it. Eventually, it would not be worth maintaining.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Almost everybody uses F/OSS all day, every day. The internet literally runs almost exclusively on linux. Servers, routers, Apple and android; all come from F/OSS and linux. "very few people use open source, in any serious way." is sheer ignorance.

    • But very few people use open source, in any serious way.

      Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for proving that you know absolutely nothing about the subject we are discussing. It is so convenient when know-nothings out themselves I cannot properly express my appreciation.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Wyzard ( 110714 )

      But very few people use open source, in any serious way.

      That is far from true.

      Linux and BSD are the dominant operating systems for servers. Open-source container systems like Podman [podman.io] and Kubernetes [kubernetes.io] are also widely used on Linux servers.

      Enterprise applications very commonly run on open-source application frameworks like Spring [spring.io] and Express.js [expressjs.com], and components of big systems often communicate through open-source messaging systems like RabbitMQ [rabbitmq.com] and Apache Kafka [apache.org]. There are also countless open-source libraries f

  • Unless this is really about fidelity to economics and not software, can you imagine the pure engineering productivity unleashed if engineers had a decent guaranteed inflation-proofed basic income and didn't have to listen to bosses telling them to artificially restrict access and features due to advertiser pressure?

  • OSS is a public good. Like fundamental research, it benefits everyone (and you may not know who,where,how for a long time), it requires long term work (longer than market tempos), and it needs freedom from economic and industry boombust cycles. So maybe OSS developers,maintainers and infrastructure could be funded by taxes, perhaps through an NGO. Many nations fund the arts and sciences and journalism and education so people can enjoy their fruits. And so no one patron or corporation directly dominates thei

  • It's the biggest trend right now: AI coding agents. Corporations can provide the services as contributions to non-profit orgs and get a tax deduction. The corporations win, and Open Source devs get access to the pro AI tool that assist with some aspects of development, in theory helping to develop software more efficiently.

  • We have all seen Mozilla (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Casandro ( 751346 ) on Monday March 30, 2026 @01:42AM (#66068384)

    Giving a project top much money is a fairly easy way to kill it. Look at Mozilla, for example.

    For years it swam in insane amounts of money. Since they cannot simply put that much money onto a bank-account, they reasonably did all kinds of non-browser related things with it. Since software development kinda doesn't need much classical management, the managers focused on those areas. A Mozilla manager didn't need to care for the browser, as that is managed by technical people.
    However once that source of money has dried up, you still have the management, which will, obviously, first cut funding for the browser part... eliminating the path to more sustainable ways of funding.

    If instead Firefox was a true "Free Software" project, this would have gone differently. Whatever money they needed would have come in by lots of small donations. They would have had limited developer resources which may have helped keeping web standards less complex. Maybe we would even have had a better web where things like Passkeys wouldn't rely on Javascript.

    • Re:We have all seen Mozilla (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Zak3056 ( 69287 ) on Monday March 30, 2026 @10:09AM (#66068820) Journal

      Since they cannot simply put that much money onto a bank-account, they reasonably did all kinds of non-browser related things with it.

      They could have created an endowment and then would not have had to worry when the money dried up, because the earnings on the principal would have funded them through the end of time. But, like most non-profits that end up with a bunch of money, they just used the opportunity for mission creep.

  • If money, then not FOSS by definition. If you intend to demand making a living from code, then giving it away and expecting payment to magically appear is grifting. FOSS is a gift for all, not a guaranteed meal ticket. Never give away more than one is able and then resent it with givers' remorse. And the hostile extremist control-freak purists of AGPL is much less free than MIT.

  • You can charge for access. It's just not open source then.

    The GPL even allows you to take a fee that covers your expenses to provide the source to people who are entitled to get it (ie. people who got the binary from you). But that's like paying for postage stamps and not charging for access.

    So if you want someone to pay, choose a license that requires that. Just don't call it open source.

  • First it was just someone no one heard of just, popping up out nowhere. Putting pull requests in multiple projects and distro's to add age verification.
    Now a push to charge for access.
    Next comes the knock on your door asking if you're using unauthorized software.

  • Again I ask, why does anyone give this moron, SJVN, a platform to spew his clickbait bullshit from?

    This story is rage bait.

    What people should be asking is why is SJVN allowed to make money off the backs of the OSS community without making any contribution? He never developed anything. He's a leach.

    Don't give the useless hull money. Make him submit his articles for free. And then flush them.

  • Interestingly, financial reward (extrinsic motivation) acts as a disincentive for some people, the types who do something for intrinsic motivation. The belief is that suddenly being paid to do something reduces that activity to merely a transaction, and that overall you may end up with fewer workers than you had before. Another danger is that you suddenly have people appearing who are only drawn by the money. If you gave developers nominal pay, like $10 or $20 an hour, you'd suddenly be overrun with very po
  • I think there need to be more morality clauses/restrictions. I donâ(TM)t want to build/contribute to something that could be used be ICE etc.

  • I stopped working on my own F/OSS projects because I was making no money and the work was being distributed by companies with market caps in the billions and trillions of dollars. Why should I waste my time and money working for free to help some asshole tech bros get rich?

  • Your legal department better have some damn good teeth. And not charge a single cent to help defend your customers' code from misappropriated uses. Even for billy's new version of an open source 'Hello Planet.' If you offer no protections except to collect money and take your cut then you are of no use to the open source community, just another self-inserted middleman like a car dealer, doordash, etc.
  • Not if the consequences are merely a slap-on-the-wrist fine that they could easily make up in a month.

  • Open source software has always been about freely sharing source code. There have always been many kinds of licenses, some of which share the code only with those who also share their code. Some make the code totally free for any purpose. Some require payment for commercial uses.

    This is not a new phenomenon. If you create open source software, you get to pick the license! If you want payment from some users, then go ahead, charge them for it, it's your prerogative! What are you griping about, exactly?

  • The moment you start charging for access, it's no longer open in the traditional sense.

    It may be free as in freedom, but you cannot exercise that freedom unless you pay up?

    We'll end up with a bunch of Mozillas trying to maximize ~shareholder~ community value.

Slashdot Top Deals

Some people manage by the book, even though they don't know who wrote the book or even what book.

Close