Free riders take more than they give, and they can stress an open system. Here's how we can begin to address the issue.
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.
Open Source is Broken
The Open Source movement, as championed by the OSI, prizes absolute openness above all other concerns...
A plan for open source software maintainers
It seems to me that this is a case where problems are in fact solutions to other problems. To wit:
Open Source is a cost-allocation system
Because the right to use the software is not tied to payment, the license does not connect the people who benefit, the people who decide, and the people who bear the costs. Projects have to build those connections deliberately through governance.
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 pay the maintainers
Or, what Voltron can teach us about improving open source development.
Open source projects are a lot more exciting than roads and bridges
In July, the Ford Foundation released “Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure”, a report on the problem of…
The Few, the Tired, the Open Source Coders
The open source movement runs on the heroic efforts of not enough people doing too much work. They need help.
When Free Software Isn't (Practically) Superior - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation
The Open Source Initiative's mission statement reads, “Open source is a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. The promise of open source is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in.”
Open source is the electric vehicle of digital policy
Open source is very popular these days, not least due to the open-source strategy that the European Commission announced last week as part of the tech sovereignty package. While there is a lot to criticise about that strategy (exaggerated goals, misleading numbers etc), the one thing I would like to
I hate the term “open source”
It doesn’t accurately reflect how people are building today anymore.
The New Deal for the Open Source Community
Building the Economic Layer to our Digital Infrastructure
Open Source Has Not Failed. Don't Cover Up Corporate Abuse of Open Source
Open source's free licensing does not drive inequality. Corporate's lack of support for open source does drive inequality.
Please welcome @railway.com as the newest member of @opensourcepledge.com 🎉 They rely on OSS projects like @vite.dev, @tanstack.com, @drizzle.team and @tailwindcss.com, and they're doing their part to sustain the ecosystem, from which we all benefit. Read all about it:
Railway Runs Open Source, Now We're Funding It
blog.railway.com