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An excellent proposal, which gets at the key issues why other mechanisms (e.g., "source available" licenses) won't work. Also, supply chain risk is a major hot topic now, e.g., with government contractors, so I think the willingness to have a "supply chain" item in a budget is only getting greater.

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.

Frank Hecker

@frankhecker.com

21 Sept

Note: I have experience with the alternatives mentioned and discarded: 1) Worked at Netscape, proposed a form of "source available" license for Netscape source, but Netscape went with the Netscape Public License, then the Mozilla Public License, then adding GPL/LGPL, due to developer preferences.

Frank Hecker

@frankhecker.com

21 Sept

2) Worked at CollabNet with (the original) Sourcexchange service, found that companies were not willing to directly pay open source developers to write open source code for them.

Frank Hecker

@frankhecker.com

3) Worked at Mozilla, realized its business model was a one-off thing not replicable elsewhere. (As an aside, I think Mozilla could have been more effective funding other open source projects and developers instead of pursuing overly-ambitious and ultimately doomed projects like the Firefox OS.)

21/9/26, 7:45 pm0 reposts1 like

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