Hacker News front page23 min readintermediate
Nobody pays for FOSS, we can force them to
Summary
The post argues that the free‑software model (MIT/BSD/Apache licenses) is an evolutionarily stable strategy: anyone can use the code for free, and attempts to charge via restrictive licenses fail because forks quickly replace them. This stability comes at a human cost—most maintainers are unpaid, many burn out, and the rapid velocity of modern ecosystems (npm, cloud services) amplifies the mainte…
- Open‑source projects that try to monetize via license restrictions are routinely forked and lose market share; the free‑software license regime remains dominant.
- Maintainer economics are dire: ~60 % of open‑source maintainers are unpaid, a tiny minority receive any funding, and a handful of developers own the majority of critical code.
- The acceleration of software adoption (npm, cloud services) has increased the maintenance cost per project without raising compensation, turning maintainership into an unpaid second job.
- Existing interventions—tips, foundation salaries, corporate pledges, security‑focused funding—are too small relative to the trillions of dollars the ecosystem generates and fail to alter the underlying equilibrium.
Enterprise reliance on open‑source creates a hidden, unsustainable labor model. When critical packages are maintained by overworked volunteers, security and reliability risks rise, as illustrated by the xz backdoor incident. Understanding the economic forces helps teams evaluate risk, contribute re…
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