Post

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.
Jovi 🐨
@jovidecroock.com

I’ve jokingly said this to many people, much of the OSS I maintain is akin to a great Dev product and in any other time it would probably be a very profitable company. Even 0.001 per download would make a big revenue for a lot of these

1 repost3 likes

Jovi 🐨
@jovidecroock.com

The sad part is that npm won’t evolve to do this and the two sided network effect of a new registry won’t be feasible as long as they exist.

Jovi 🐨
@jovidecroock.com

Coming from someone who has built a lot of products aimed at developers and eventually never published anything due to getting discouraged by AI. Most of my effort goes to OSS anyway and realising the profits coming forth from OSS comsumer is disheartening