> 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.

I 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.

>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

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've spent a bit of time thinking about this[0] - as a maintainer (oapi-codegen, Renovate, previously Jenkins Job DSL Plugin and Wiremock), as someone who used to work on "how can we better fund our company's dependencies", and building projects and products to better understand dependency usage

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/

If this actually happens, get ready for an avalanche of AI-generated garbage code that exists for the sole purpose of boosting a scammer's metrics, so they can maximize their slice of the pie with the minimum amount of effort. Spotify is dealing with this same issue around AI-generated music [1].

1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/lesliekatz/2024/09/08/man-charg...

That would be fun. Could over time round roughly to charging everyone to fund the use of GitHub Copilot to work on open source.

Maybe it's just me, but I don't think the solution to the open source funding problem is to force people to pay for it. I think that goes against the spirit of open source. If there is forced payment, or even the expectation of payment, then we're not really doing the whole original open source thing, we're just doing bad source available commercial-ish software.

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.

Proposals like these seem to assume that FOSS is mostly produced by unpaid volunteers. But a lot of the open-source stuff that I personally use is produced by massively profitable companies.

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.

If you willingly choose to make source code publicly available under an open source license you can’t then act all shocked that people don’t have to pay you for using that code. If you wanted to be guaranteed an income whenever your code gets used, you should have chosen a different license.

GitHub cannot see enterprise repos. Those are purposely kept on-prem.

How about GitHub stops using GPL'd code to train models? The authors weren't asking for payment, they were just asking not to reuse their code without GPL.

> Those funds would then be distributed by usage - every mention in a package.json or requirements.txt gets you a piece of the pie.

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.

IMHO Open Source Software is a public good, and should be mostly funded like other public goods: through government grants.

GitHub charging its users, who themselves are mostly OSS developers (and not end users) doesn't seem like a sensible solution.

The first order effect of this would be great, but the following onslaught of schlinkert spam would be devastating- its bad enough now with people making garbage dependencies and sneaking them in everywhere just for clout

So you sprinkle a few tens of thousands of dollars across a few hundreds of thousands of developers every month? Thanks for the $0.48 Github.

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?

This would not fund the people you want it to fund.

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.

If you pay for it to gain the access, then it is not open source. In open source, everyone can access it and contribute (in theory).

The transitive nature of dependencies makes fund allocation extremely wonky. Say you have Next.js as a dependency in your package.json file? How many dependencies does Next.js itself have? What portion of your funds go to Next.js versus all the transitive dependencies of Next.js?

Not a great take.

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.

I paid 1 buck for WhatsApp back in the day. Better business model than what meta did with it. But we're moving closer and closer to 8 companies controlling the world. Both WhatsApp and github are owned by them.

This transformation of open-source into rent-seeking behaviour is quite distasteful to me. If you don't want to share your stuff without taxing everyone, then don't share it. Other licenses exist. You don't have to use MIT or the GPL.

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.

The sense of entitlement is strong in these comments. If you haven’t built or maintained OSS I’m wondering why your opinion matters [edit: that's harshly worded I could have been more nuanced, hopefully the point is taken and it is a question]. There’s also the take that “this is fine” vs considering that the state of OSS things could be a LOT better with higher quality and more choices if we fed the beast properly.

No. I would get rid of "should" to "could" but it actually would warp the open source world once money is involved. People would start optimizing what they do to try and get a slice of the pie.

One thing I thought that got me interested about Brave was this part of their business modell. It had the potential to support this type of economy almost without any attrition. It was not that different from flattr, with the difference that people would be able to contribute just by accepting the notification ads and passing along their earnings.

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.)

> every mention in a package.json or requirements.txt

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.

>It is crazy, absolutely crazy to depend on open source to be free (as beer).

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.

Static rules will be gamed.

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.

...With absolutely nothing expected in return. This is for work completed, not for leverage on future work

Considering that Github already has indirectly done a biggest theft in the tech history, I'd say: no way.

Many open source projects are created by engineers being paid to solve a problem their employer has, and they just happen to release it freely.

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.

How much was left-pad worth? Lots of people used it because it's free, not because it's valuable.

Instead of a dollar from github users, I think it should just be a hefty tax on big tech companies that have valuations of over a billion. The nature of software and tech means that there are massive monopolies where winner takes all. We should just accept that and leverage it.

OSS works partially because a lot of stuff is free as in beer. I rely on probably many thousands of OSS projects directly or indirectly on a daily basis. So does everyone else.

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.

Taxes, that's called taxes.

Tax large companies properly then you don't have to tax the public for things like this.

npm funds is that to a certain extent -> https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v11/commands/npm-fund

This... exists? Did they even search for it? https://github.com/open-source/sponsors

> Those funds would then be distributed by usage - every mention in a package.json or requirements.txt gets you a piece of the pie.

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.

$1 USD is ~90 Indian Rupees, 1450 Argentinian Peso or over 1 million Iranian Rial [1]. In some places, $1 USD could be a week's work. On the collection side, you could be seriously over-charging people. On the distribution side, you could be seriously overpaying people for their work - and encourage scams, etc.

> 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.

[1] https://www.x-rates.com/table/?from=USD&amount=1

If you make every single person go through Github's miserable auth process just to do git pull, they are going to leave

I do like this idea, as it seems easy to implement. Github can just increase its prices by $1/month/orguser and that fund could end up with like, i think, 6 million per month. Thats a sizeable amount of money and could help in making open source more sustainable & attractive.

>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

Goodbye 90% of open source software I guess then

This is a terrible idea in my opinion and it's been tried/is being tried by services like thanks.dev. Yes, we need something here but this is not it. The reality is more complex.

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.

Great. That would mean that 98% of the github users would leave it.

This is suggesting Microsoft should take more power to itself, and disguise it as "community support"

I'd support this if only to end the nightmare that is the JS ecosystem

let everything be gratis and if you need something fixed, and engineer you hired to work for you in your org can fork or send in a patch. there, I solved it

BRB donating to Forgejo.

should be the transitive dependencies, not just top-level (so the lock file or equiv) or you just reward the "barely wrap it and give it a new name" js crowd even more.

no.

You mean Microsoft?

Schemes like this have a way of getting captured.

the problem with any approach like this based on usage metrics is that it will be abused to death

<humour> sounds like socialism amirite?</humour>

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.

$5 a month per dependency, OK let's go! Hold up I've just reorganized my packages into sqlalchemy-base, sqlalchemy-core-sql, sqlalchemy-orm, sqlalchemy-oh-you-want-deletes-also, sqlalchemy-fewer-bugs, and about eight more

the payment isn't the problem so much as the payment processing. They wouldn't support crypto, even if they did, getting crypto without KYC hassle is a PITA, not worth it for paying one company $1. Not associating your real identity with a github repo is very important to most github users.

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.

I disagree, due to github copilot and other AI crap Microsoft is adding to GitHub, they should pay us 5 USD per month.

love this idea on so many levels. Of course, then the fight moves to how allocation happens, and how to avoid people further gaming things like repo stars, forks, PRs, voting, dependencies, etc.

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/

> 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.

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.

You do not want to add profit incentives like this to FOSS.

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?