It seems the open-source experiment has failed. Hundreds of billion-dollar companies have been built on millions of hours of free labor, on the backs of ten thousands of now-burnt-out maintainers. Yet, apart from token gestures, these exploiting entities have never shared substantial or equitable profits back.

For the next generation of OSS, it would be wise to stand together and introduce a new licensing model: if a company builds a product using an open-source library and reaches a specific revenue threshold (e.g., $XX million), they must compensate the authors proportional to the library's footprint in their codebase and/or its execution during daily operations.

we have a solution for that: GPL + commercial dual-licensing. the problem is that a) there is an entire anti-GPL crowd; although I'd just not give a shit about them, it's worth mentioning, b) who's gonna enforce the license?, c) how are you going to monetize internal use? what if your tech (e.g. a build system) is only really useful internally?

> It seems the open-source experiment has failed

People have been saying this since the 80s. Reality is that without open source, this industry would be tiny compared to what it is. So many times open source has enabled an entire sub industry (i.e. ISPs in the 90s, Database, SaaS in the 2010s, now AI). And most of it is someone solving a problem that was worth solving for their own use, and for whatever reason made no sense to commercialize by selling licenses.

> on the backs of ten thousands of now-burnt-out maintainers.

Money isn't the motivation for most "free" open source. If it was, the authors would release as commercial software and maybe as "source available". That someone can use open source to build businesses has been the engine for the entire industry. In other words, the thought that maintainers quitting maintaining is some problem that can be fixed if we only paid them is non-sequitur. A lot of it is that people age out, get bored with their project, or simply want to do something else. Not accepting money for maintaining open source is a good way to ensure it stays something you can walk away from and something where the people attached to the money have zero leverage.

I do think that a lot of maintainers struggle with pushy and sometimes nasty people that take the fun out of what is a "labor of love."

> exploiting entities have never shared substantial or equitable profits back.

If I want to make money, I sell commercial software, SaaS or PaaS.

> they must compensate the creators proportional to the library's footprint in their codebase and/or its execution during daily operations

One of the more interesting uses of open source is to level the playing field. For example, there was a time when database was silly expensive. Several open source products emerged that never would have been viable commercially without the long term promise of "free" and the assurance of having source code. To have a license with a cost bomb on it would just ensure that people would use another choice.

This mostly just sounds like a poison pill that commercial entities wouldn't use, and if you want that you can already use AGPL.

Especially as the cost of producing code drops, the value of libraries decreases.

Without teeth (and the resources to initiate the bite), companies will just freeload. Any attempts to monitor will require some degree of telemetry or proprietary solutions, with the associated blowback that generates.

The only model I've seen work in reality is open core (aside from the very few projects that have been successful with patronage)

And then you'd be getting things like Hollywood accounting, where companies will claim that the "footprint" is not that large or simply find ways to hide their usage of FOSS.

There are licenses like that, just don't call them open source. They're just another form of proprietary software albeit sometimes also being source available.

If you want to make money, make commercial software and sell it. It's funny to see people complain about people taking what they gave out for free, it's like having a lemonade stand with a huge sign saying "free" and being surprised people take the lemonade.

Good idea.

The MIT license and other "pushover" licenses was built in the pre-LLM era.

I don't think it is fit for purpose anymore since now maintainers are getting burnt out and most code is now being generated from OSS.

A new OSS license for the AI age must be made for newer libraries, projects and existing projects that want to change licenses.