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Hacker News Hacker NewsI am. I enjoy making things, and it's even better when others enjoy them. Just because you have expectations that you should be compensated for everything line of code you write; doesn't make it ubiquitous, nor should your expectations be considered the default.
I'd argue If you're creating and releasing open source with the expectations of compensation, you're doing it wrong. Equally, if you expect someone creating open source owes you anything, you're also part of the problem, (and part of why people feel they deserve compensation for something that used to be considered a gift).
All that said, you should take care of your people, if you can help others; especially when you depend on them. I think you should try. Or rather, I hope you would.
Yes it absolutely is. That is the exact social contract people 100% willingly enter by releasing something as Free and Open Source. They do give it as a gift, in exchange for maybe the tiny bit of niche recognition that comes with it, and often times out of simple generosity. Is that really so incredible?
I think the solution is for people to understand that open source goes both ways. Unlike what this post says, users don't owe maintainers anything, but maintainers also don't owe the users anything. If I build something cool and share it freely, why should users expect anything from me? Why should you expect me to maintain it or add the features you want? I think we need a mentality change where less is expected from maintainers, unless funding is arranged.
After all, it's free and open source. No one is forcing you to use it. Don't like that I'm not actively developing it? Submit a PR or fork it. Isn't that what the original spirit of open source was? I think that open source has been so succesful and good that we've come to expect it to be almost like commercial software. That's not what it is.
1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/lesliekatz/2024/09/08/man-charg...
Yes this is uncomfortable, but the simple fact is that if you don't tell anyone you want to get paid, you probably won't be given any money. Standard seem to be maybe there's a donation link somewhere on the site, buried 4 clicks deep in the FAQ, more often than not something like a paypal.
The reality is that if you do ask for money, surprisingly often people will straight up just give you money if they like what you're doing. Like people get paid real money for screaming at video games on Twitch, meanwhile you're building something people find useful. Of course you can make money off it. But you gotta ask for it, the game screamers on twitch sure do. That's the secret. Sure there's a scale from asking for donations and doing a Jimmy Wales and putting a your face on a banner begging for donations; and while going full jimbo is arguably taking it too far, it's also probably closer to the optimum than you'd imagine.
If you have corporate users, word on the street is you can also just reach out to them and ask for sponsorship. They're not guaranteed to say yes, but they're extremely unlike to sponsor you spontaneously.
Usage is not a good proxy for value or ongoing effort. I have a npm package with tens of millions of weekly downloads. It's only a few lines long and it's basically done - no maintenance required.
I'm skeptical that there exists an algorithmic way to distribute funds that's both efficient and resistant to gaming.
For example, I am currently working with React, which was produced by Meta. I write the code using TypeScript, which was produced by Microsoft (and other corporate behemoths such as Google). I am writing this comment in Chrome (produced by Google). Etc.
Bad or borderline actors would be so much better at creating whatever metrics you're basing things off of that the actual value creators wouldn't stand a chance.
It's easy to predict what sort of incentives this would produce, and how bad they would be. Fewer users and way more spammy projects to say the least.
GH could easily end up having to spend more than it collected in fighting abuse.
s/thousands/millions/ the point stands that there are way more devs than commercial accounts, and even then, even if it's 1:1, you get $1?
> GitHub should charge every org $1 more per user per month and direct it into an Open Source fund, held in escrow.
Sure. It'll be some charity, then somebody gets paid $200k+ per year to distribute what remains after they've taken the majority, all whilst avoiding most taxes. To receive the money the person has to ID themselves, financial background checks need to be done, a minimum amount needs to be reached before a payment is made, and then after passing through multiple wanting hands, they end up with a fraction.
> Those funds would then be distributed by usage - every mention in a package.json or requirements.txt gets you a piece of the pie.
What even is "usage"? How many times it appears in a number of repos? How many users there are of the project? Is the usefulness and value of a project limited to the number of people that directly use it?
> Or don’t! Let’s not do anything! People’s code and efforts - fueling incredibly critical bits of infrastructure all around the world - should just be up for grabs. Haha! Suckers!
> Anyway, you all smarter than me people can figure it out. I just cannot accept that what we have is “GOOD”. xx
It's entirely possible you can make things worse by avoiding doing nothing. Sometimes in life you have to pick the lesser of evils.
I don't think Google needs a dollar every time I write a script in golang or run a container in kubernetes, and I would put a lot less trust in Envoy if I thought Lyft was building it profit and not because they needed to.
By paying companies like Red Hat, Canonical, Google and Amazon, who in turn spend massive amounts of money employing software developers to work on Linux.
Maybe economists could do what is ostensibly their job and try to prevent the “tetris game of software depending on the OSS maintained by one guy in Nebraska...” situation. In the meanwhile people who do things under no duress for free could stop doing it.
(Not that OSS is all hobby activities. There are many who are paid to do it. But these appeals only talk about the former.)
Unfortunately, the crypto angle made sure that mostly degens and speculators got into it. Perhaps if stabletokens were more established by the time they started, it would be easier to market it.
(I am not going to get into yet-another discussion about Brave as a company. I will flag any attempt at derailing the conversation.)
Why? It's not crazy at all. It's the status quo with no sign of things changing. It is both possible right now and likely continue. Its not crazy.
If it's not worth maintaining people will stop. If people need it they will develop it. The current incentive structure has produced lots of open source code that is being maintained.
>It is not okay - it is not okay to consider that this labor fell from the sky and is a gift, and that the people/person behind are just doing it for their own enjoyments.
It is if there is no cost. You can always charge for it. But you can't make it free then pretend its not.
You can easily sponsor Iran or Russia killing real people by doing such things.
Powerful tools, once released, can be used by anyone, including those with harmful intentions. And let's be honest: much of open source functions as a way for large companies to cut costs on essential but non-differentiating infrastructure. That's fine, but it complicates the idealistic narrative.
With generative AI, these questions matter more. Maybe it's time to revisit what open source should mean in this context.
Meta has even demonstrated an alternative with the Llama 4 License which has exclusion criteria:
> 2. Additional Commercial Terms. If, on the Llama 4 version release date, the monthly active users of the products or services made available by or for Licensee, or Licensee’s affiliates, is greater than 700 million monthly active users in the preceding calendar month, you must request a license from Meta, which Meta may grant to you in its sole discretion, and you are not authorized to exercise any of the rights under this Agreement unless or until Meta otherwise expressly grants you such rights.
Go put such terms in your licenses.
This is particularly rampant in the Rust community and if I'm being honest this forced tithing church nonsense from people who want to be priests makes participating in that community less desirable. I don't even want to donate to the RSF as a result.
All the other projects I've donated to in the past have been much more reasonable. This kind of pushy nonsense is unacceptable.
Literally anyone could create a support and maintenance organization that takes MIT license projects into an AWS like split and only get paid if the support they provide remains valuable to people who pay for the value of the support and maintenance.
As others have noted, there are a few areas to watch out for, and:
- some ecosystems have more dependencies over fewer, and so we need to consider how to apply a careful weighting in line with that - how do we handle forks? Does a % of the money go to the original maintainers who did 80% of the work? - how can companies be clever to not need to pay this? - some maintainers don't want financial support, and that's OK - some project creators / maintainers don't get into the work for the money (... because there is often very little) - there's a risk of funding requirements leading to "I'm not merging your PR without you paying me" which is /not problematic/ but may not be how some people (in particular companies) would like to operate
[0]: https://www.jvt.me/posts/2025/02/20/funding-oss-product/
It is always people who make a thing for free then people find it useful and start using it then they start using that free and open source thing at work instead of writing a copy and that’s when the original person starts asking for donations and money.
The reason your project is popular is because it is free. If it wasn’t free we would have probably written our own or used something else.
In my personal GH account there is a "sponsor" button that shows me what dependencies I have that I could sponsor. Unfortunately the list is empty.
My _organisations_ have hundreds of repo's, but there's no "sponsor" option at the org level in GH that says what dependencies the orgs use and then set up batch transactions at that level.
The dependency data already exists in dependabot for a lot of stuff, so it wouldn't be starting from scratch.
OK, what about those of us who aren't writing libraries?
As a personal anecdote, the amount of opportunities that have been opened up to me as a result of my open source project are worth way more than any $1 per mention or user.
The problem for some people is that they want to get paid for their work and just aren't; or not enough. I won't judge that. Writing software is hard work. Whether you donate your time and how much of your time is a personal choice to make. But of course a lot of OSS gets paid for indirectly via companies paying people to work on them (most long lived projects have paid contributors like that) or in a few cases because the companies behind these projects have some business model that actually works. Some people donate money to things they like. And some projects are parked under foundations that accept donations. That's all fine. But there are also an enormous amount of projects out there and most of them will never receive a dollar for any of it. OSS wouldn't work without this long tail of unpaid contributors.
I have a few OSS projects of my own. I don't accept donations for them. I don't get paid for them. I have my own reasons for creating these projects; but money isn't one of those. And people are welcome to use them. That's why these projects are open source.
MS and Github make loads of money. There's a reason they give the freemium version away for free: it funnels enough people into the non free version that it is worth it to them. Charging money to everyone might actually break that for them. I happily use their freemium stuff. I did pay for it a long time ago when private projects weren't part of the freemium layer. Anyway their reasons/motivations are theirs. I'm sure it all makes sense for them and their share holders.
If people feel guilty about not donating to each of the thousands of projects they rely on (or any, because why cherry pick?), you can pay back in a different way and try to contribute once in a while. Just pay it forward. Yes you somebody put a lot of work in the stuff that you use. And you put some work in stuff that others get to use. If enough people keep on doing that (and the success of OSS hints that they do), OSS will be here to stay.
https://docs.github.com/en/sponsors/sponsoring-open-source-c...
Corporations who use and benefit from software should be made to pay for their use of that software, but they don't want to, which is why they'll happily spend money promoting the use of corporate-friendly and maximally exploitable open source licensing among the passionate individuals who maintain the lions share of their dependency tree.
Microsoft, a $3.4T company, should charge people for open source they didn't even write?
Hell no. Hell no.
It doesn't work well in practice. Because then people like https://github.com/sindresorhus?tab=repositories&type=source would get a shit ton of money because of the pure number of dependencies. And yes our stack also contains his code somewhere in a debug UI but our main product is entirely written in a different programming language with way fewer dependencies but if one of them goes away we'd be in trouble. In other words: Dependency count is not a good metric for this.
GitHub actually offers something in that direction: https://github.com/sponsors/explore
My "idea": Lots of companies will have to create SBOMs anyway. Take all of those but also scan your machines and take all the open source software running on there (your package.lock does not contain VLC etc.) and throw it in a big company wide BOM, then somehow prioritise those using algorithms, data and just manual voting and then upload that to some distributor who then distributes this to all the relevant organisations and people and then (crucially) sends me (as a company) an invoice.
We've tried doing the right thing but sponsoring is hard - it works differently for every project/foundation and the administrative overhead is huge.
The reality is that "we" as an open-source community suck at taking money and I believe this is partially on us.
Also, not all programs use package.json and requirements.txt, so that won't work anyways.
license A is GPL or MIT for academic and free applications
License B is for commercial use, with a fee
The license is literally whatever you want to put into it.
IMO the issue is with the open source community gatekeeping these policies. Shaming developers for proposing commercial licensing, then shaming corporations for properly using the IP according to the free license (e.g. MIT)
Could have worked before LLMs.
Also, funding by popularity would mean alternatives would have a harder time to emerge and get the funding they need to compete against the established popular projects.
Being an Open Source project doesn't mean that it provides the best solution to the problem it's supposed to solve. Diversity is important.
It is also kind of crazy to want Microsoft to manage FOSS taxation and funding.
(this holds true for all of the other times this idea has been suggested, too).
And this does not take into account the various fees, taxes etc, that will be removed before any money gets into an OSS developer's bank account.
If you want to support a project, submit a PR or send them a check. Don't force me do it for you.
It'll never happen; open source doesn't have the legal team of Disney [1].
If anyone is making money off the code they should pay annual fee which goes to contributors. Github can setup an escrow, manage licenses and distribute the money to contributors.
So this is a weird statement to me, like you always want more.
GitHub charging its users, who themselves are mostly OSS developers (and not end users) doesn't seem like a sensible solution.
Goodbye 90% of open source software I guess then
Instead, why not accept the reality that 1) projects may charge for their offerings and 2) users may have to pay for such offerings? As a user, if a project's offering is useful to me, then I should be willing to pay for it. As a creator, if I want to get paid for my offering, then I should be willing to ask for it. An upside of such a change could be that we start being more focused and prudent about what we use and create.
Without such delegation, projects will have to do the heavy lifting in terms of collection of funds; features such as sponsorship in GH or setting up e-payments via Stripe or Paypay may help reduce this brunt.
greg just proposed sanctions, more sanction. without disriminating that for some kids 1 is too much or impossible.
greg why do you want more suffering to people?
The REAL problem becomes, who gets funding? ouch
Payment could solve lots of problems, but there is no real and meaningful cash-equivalent payment system or method. This isn't a tech problem either, governments allow cash payments, but if it is digital, they won't allow any means that preserves privacy. Money laundering is their concern. You can't solve this without laws changing. Even if I don't mind buying crypto with a credit card, I still have to go through proving my identity with my id card, as if my credit-card company didn't do that already.
payment is a huge barrier to commerce these days, people think LLMs will change the world, but payment tech/laws will have a bigger effect in my opinion.
Let's say HN mods go a little crazy one day and want to let us tip each other for good posts and comments, imagine if all they had to do is add an html tag in the right place and that's it. All we had to do is click a button and it just works, and there is no exposure of private information by any involved party, and you could fund that payment by buying something (a card?) at a convenience store in person, just as easily as you could with a crypto payment, moneygram or wire transfer.
I __want__ to pay so many news sites, blogs,etc... I don't mind tipping a few bucks to some guy who wrote a good blog, or who put together a decent project on github that saved me lots of time and work.
It isn't merely the change in economics or people getting a buck here and there, but the explosion in economic activity you have to look at. The generation of wealth, not the mere zero-sum transferring of currency. This is the type of stuff that changes society drastically, like freeways being invented, women being able to ride bicycles, airplanes allowing fast transport, telegrams allowing instant messaging,etc..
Everyone being able to easily pay anyone at all, including funding private as well as commercial projects would be more disruptive than democracy itself, if I could dare make that claim. There is freedom of movement, there is freedom of communication and last there is freedom of trade. these are the ultimate barriers to human progress. Imagine if everyone from texas to beijing could fund research and projects, trade stocks in companies (all companies in the world). You won't need governments to fund climate change work, I think eventually taxation itself will have to suffer, because people would be able to direct exactly where their funds went. Not just what department in the government gets a budget, but exactly what projects they spend it on. being able to not just talk or meet each other instantly (and even those have a long way to go) but to also collectively or as individuals found each other, governments and companies, that'd be the biggest thing that could happen this century.
This could be done, but again, we don't need better tech as much as we need a change in attitude. For people to actually believe this would result in a better world for them.
Individuals and companies love open source software, but the current donation models don’t really work.
I thought this problem was bad for programming libraries (e.g. the recent Tailwind stuff), but after using Linux desktop open source—which has much less incentive for companies to donate or sponsor—oh boy, it’s bad.
Open source evokes a lot of emotions, but at its core, to me, it’s two things:
A collection of “features” (depending on license / governance):
* You can use it for free, no matter what
* You can see how it works
* You can modify the software
etc.
These are genuinely valuable features, which is why open source has won.
But these features are unavoidably coupled to business models and incentive structures for the developers who create this value.
Right now, open source developers and companies can only extract a relatively small percentage of the (considerable) value they create. As a result, only very large or strategically important projects become financially sustainable.
I agree with the article that the solution likely involves a different business model or incentive alignment—but this is a very hard problem.
We’ve seen major business model shifts outside open source during my career:
- SaaS software (used to be one-time payments)
- Microtransactions in games (personally dislike them, but they radically changed incentives and revenue)
These shifts are often counterintuitive and closely tied to human behavior.
I don’t agree with the specific solution proposed in the article, but I don’t have a clean answer either.
My best (very rough) idea:
Create a non-profit that builds tooling and infrastructure to measure open source usage (tricky!).
Loosely, you run something like:
oss-usage
'tailwind': 5 # units TBD
'npm': 8
'haskell': 1
'stripe': {
usage: {
'tailwind': 5,
'npm': 40,
'haskell': 1,
'ruby': 60
},
totalDonationDollars: 100000,
donationBreakdown: {
'ruby': 10000,
'haskell': 100,
'tailwind': 5000
}
}
'oracle': 'not yet claimed'
'dave': {
usage: {
'svelte': 20,
'pnpm': 40
},
totalDonationDollars: 100,
donationBreakdown: {
'svelte': 20,
'pnpm': 40
}
}
Companies can claim (or not) their usage. Developers can claim (or not) their projects and funds.
Donations are aggregated into one transaction per month, solving the microtransaction problem.
This creates a public, open record of who is funding open source. I think that could be a strong incentive for larger companies—engineers will notice when choosing where to work.
Bad actors who under-donate or refuse to disclose won’t be invisible; we’ll know where they stand.
Anyway - if you’ve read this far and are interested in working on or funding this idea, come find me: https://richardgill.org
Open Source Software underwrites everything. It makes the largest human endeavors work. It makes silly ephemeral games little notes apps and digital art run. Turning maintainers into a kind of digital landlord that charges a fee is both insultingly low bore and enough to squeeze the life out of computing as a hobby.
Government grants can be used to cover infrastructural open source. Not every open source wants money, so this scheme has ro be opt-in. Further, entitled "paying" users[1] will make things much worse for small projects. "I paid for this package, so you need to fix this show-stopper bug before we ship on Friday"
Having a passion project is great, having it gain traction is even better, but that is not sufficient to make it a job / company. The utility of open source projects range from "I could implement the bits I use in under an hour" to "It would take 100-person team years".
Is that not what most of open source is? Things people make for themselves because they either found it fun or solved their own problem, then published it for others to use for free. Most projects are not worth the bureaucratic tax related headaches the income from them would bring (maybe that's just my EU showing).
What's not okay is demanding new features or to fix something urgently. That's paid territory.
Honestly this post is such a shit take it's borderline intentional ragebait.
Not sure how open source got bamboozled into paying rent to Microsoft of all companies.
[1]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680114...
In principle it sounds like a grand idea, although there are a bunch of corner cases like how it works cross country borders, and de-anonymising maintainers.
If it was opt in for opensource projects, and there are strong guards against people forking/hard takover-ing then yes, it seems like a good idea in principle.
I will leave the AI enthusiasts to chime in about the future, and how we don't need OS anymore.
People would milk the system as much as they could, only to become the most popular library, only to get most of the "pie".
I guess Python/JS devs would get the most of it. Because their ecosystem is most fragmented. C++ or assembly devs? Nothing.
I don't think this idea is thought out. Money corrupts things.
There already is a "market" for stars. But if stars would indicate how much someone earns, it would be morbid. Well, in some way, I guess they already do, but it's linked at least indirectly.
This is a common anti-pattern of utopian, this will work this time(tm), improperly-educated dreamers who are much too comfortable with totalitarianism like taking money, property, and rights from others without asking for their consent.
Robbing peasants to build palaces and pet projects. Maybe start with "demanding" every big company fund them than taxing average people.
This is so dumb.
in particular, there's repos with extremely high activity where funding doesn't help anyone and repos with low activity where funding ensures continuity for key components we all depend on but which are under-funded for various reasons.
obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2347/
Profit incentives like the one suggested is what brought us enshitification.
And the code is a free gift, unless the licence says otherwise. What's wrong with letting developers choose what to bill for?