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Laurie Voss
@seldo.com

I have been writing this post about the economics of open source, on and off, for 13 years. I wasn't expecting to end up at "Microsoft should send corporations a huge bill" but nothing else we've tried has worked. https://seldo.com/posts/nobody-pays-for-open-source-we-can-force-them-to/

seldo.comNobody pays for open source. We can force them to. | Seldo.comThirty years of voluntary funding schemes haven't paid open source maintainers because asking doesn't scale. The real money already flows — to JFrog, Docker, Sonatype — at the registry layer. The fix: registries charge companies for supply (they already do), then route a slice automatically to the maintainers who make that supply worth having.
bryan english
@bengl.dev

I love a blog post where I can't find anything I disagree with. Nice job. That said I have questions: 1. Have you run any numbers to determine how viable this would be and how much it would actually impact maintainers'/contributors' income as opposed to those other streams?

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bryan english
@bengl.dev

3. Are the payout distributions appropriate in any existing "second half of your solution"? In a project with many contributors, is a maintainer worth more than a contributor? What about projects with much more complex governance?

Laurie Voss
@seldo.com

Only that the ballpark is "billions" as opposed to the ~100m currently on offer. It's at least an order of magnitude more money, but depends enormously how they price it.

bryan english
@bengl.dev

"how they price it" can also impact the industry's choice of default (companies, like developers, do have the ability to ragequit and change vendors), so this is a delicate game to play. 🤔