Open source software runs on volunteer contributor labor. But U.S. labor law has rules about volunteering. Does open source have a labor law problem?
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.
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.
Home - Open Source Collective
Open Source Collective is a non-profit fiscal host for open source projects. Get Transparent fundraising, money management, and legal representation
Katerina Marchán (@zkat@toot.cat)
Open source maintainers of major projects (hi) are not ready to accept and talk about how the cultural insistence on permissive licensing is just straight up labor exploitation taking advantage of our addiction to popularity (also hi). We’re doing this to ourselves too, you know.
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.
Some startups are going ‘fair source’ to avoid the pitfalls of open source licensing | TechCrunch
New alternative category to 'closed source' could help companies monetize software in the open -- without going all-in on open source.
Open source is a restaurant
[[Chad Whitacre]] makes a great analogy around when/how software gets paid for, vs food. Open Source is a restaurant. At a restaurant, you eat your meal fir...
Open Source is Broken
The Open Source movement, as championed by the OSI, prizes absolute openness above all other concerns...
Open Source, Incentives, and Why 'Monetize Later' Often Backfires
How misaligned incentives undermine open source projects — and why 'monetize later' often leads to the very restrictions open source was meant to avoid.
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.
Money, Money, Money - Writing software, in a rich (wo)man's world by Russell Keith-Magee
Paying people to work on open source is good actually - Jacob Kaplan-Moss
If you have a problem with maintainers getting paid then you have a problem with me and I suggest you let that one marinate.
Open Source is four kinds of economic goods
Open Source code and the stewardship around it have different economics. That distinction helps show what a project might charge for, what it must budget for, and how it could fund stewardship without making the code less open.
Sorting out the Ethical Licensing Mess
Software developers who give the world, for free, usage rights to the code they write often use open source licenses to make this gift legally explicit. These free usage rights (and then some) are …
Contributor Covenant | Contributor Covenant 3
The most widely adopted code of conduct in open source. Stewarded by the Organization for Ethical Source.
