Post

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.

James Milner

@jameslmilner.com

This is an interesting premise. Potentially the hard part might be in the checks and balances around the fraud aspect you mention. Potentially setting a bar for payout, for example tie it in with package security best practices, a min package age, min number of verified dependents.

13/9/26, 9:43 am1 repost0 likes

James Milner

@jameslmilner.com

13 Sept

Obviously to a degree those things are game-able and finding a set of criteria that isn't might be tough, but it might make or break the concept in the era of AI agents.