In an offshoot of the Debian discussion we looked at last week, the Debian project has been dis [...]
Invasion of The Ethical Licenses
About 23 years ago, I created the Debian Free Software Guidelines to help the Debian developers decide what software was permissible to include in Debian, which aspired to be 100% Free Software, and what should be consigned to a "non-free" repository upon which Debian would never depend. Nine months later, those guidelines became the Open Source Definition, and I announced Open Source to the world.
It's time to pay the maintainers
Or, what Voltron can teach us about improving open source development.
Nobody pays for open source. We can force them to. | Seldo.com
Thirty 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.
It’s time to rethink Open Source
Why developers give away valuable work for free — and what can be done to take that money back.
Introducing Sponsorware: How A Small Open Source Package Increased My Salary By $11k in Two Days
<p>After digging deep on SQLite during a pair programming session with a client/friend, I had an idea…</p> <p>About 45 minutes later, a proo...
Aaron Boodman on Twitter / X
There is this tension in dev tooling right now: Lots of people want to self-host, and not depend on a service. Lots of people also want the vibes of open source - being part of an open development community, having the code, etc.But builders still need to make a living...— Aaron Boodman (@aboodman) January 23, 2024
Ditching GitHub
This is going to be some sort of a public service announcement, withside notes. This has been brewing for a long, long time (years), it’sjust that I never se...
Distributions are becoming irrelevant: difference was our strength and our liability
For someone that has spent the past thirteen years defining himself as a developer of a Linux distribution…
Indirect funding and the limits of free software patronage | Teleogistic
A few thoughts about direct and indirect funding for free software development.
How we raised $3M for an open source project - PostHog
Open source projects have long battled with how to finance themselves. PostHog is lucky to have significant funding and wanted to share what we did…
Why Funding Open Source is Hard
tl;dr: Either developers need to change, or GitHub needs to change
What it costs to run Drupal's infrastructure
Dries is the Founder and Project Lead of Drupal and the Co-founder and Executive Chair of Acquia.
Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue | Hacker News
> SPI acts as a fiscal sponsor to many free and open source projects ... we encourage programmers to use the GNU General Public License or other licenses that allow free redistribution and use of software and hardware developers to distribute documentation that will allow device drivers to be written for their product ... all donations made to SPI and its supported projects are tax deductible for donors in the United States.
Help fund our lil indie operation! Larger legacy communities on Discord can now pay $30/month to unlock live bridging at scale for the purpose of either safe-keeping or incrementally transitioning their community to Roomy and the atmosphere. should we add a $5/month good-vibes-only supporter plan?
Roomy Pro
blog.roomy.spaceGitHub says individuals and orgs have invested $100M+ in open source maintainers and projects via GitHub Sponsors since 2019, with $10M in the past five months (Stephanie Lincoln/The GitHub Blog) github.blog/open-source/maintainers/100-m… | techmeme.com/260721/p3#a260721p3
I'll go against the discourse. 280 contributors to repo.npmx.dev in 100 days. We only used bluesky for social comms. We asked while welcoming folks, and most of them got involved after reading our bsky posts. Thanks for building and running bluesky. This network is a great place to do open source 💙
patak
Wild to see that @npmx.dev was the fastest-growing emerging open source organization by number of contributors in Q1 2026 according to osscar.dev. What is even more interesting: it was the only non-AI tool in the top 10.
