There is a problem somewhere deep in capitalist economies. The model has served humanity well - from Napoleon to Neo-Liberal the world has seen vaccines, space flight, farming revolutions and sewage plants giving longer better life to billions.

But … OSS is like a bellwether - the foundations of this great wealth need investment and maintenance else we build on rotting timbers.

And when a major global e-commerce platform chucks a few Weeks salary of a junior developer in SV and we call it worth mentioning, we need to find a new way to shore up those foundations.

I don’t have a good answer - I suspect I need to look deeper at the real problem - but it does seem to be a real problem

The model we have works for used packages. If a package is used by a large company and requires maintenance, the company pays its engineers to do it, and the rest of us receive the updates for free due to the license.

However, the system breaks down for packages that are not used by major companies (or are stable and safe enough to avoid triggering an alarm).

There is no viable way to fund continuous support for every forgotten open-source project.

On the flip side, freedom is related to independence. If a company would heavily fund the Perl society or another FOSS, it would become dependent and loosing it's freedom. Freedom is something you cannot count or measure with capitalist thinking, but it does not mean there is no value to it.