This has literally been the case now for 40 years, and yet the open source movement is stronger than ever. So why now? Also charging for access? Stallman will rip your balls off.

For their money, large companies want the proverbial throat to choke - even when they've never successfully choked the throats they've paid for. The footprint of open source in these companies often grew through bottom up implementation. The moment that somebody has to pay an ongoing support contract, it will become a financial and strategic decision. That means vendor management, tech and vendor downselection, risk analysis... the best-effort maintainer isn't going to fly.

If I were a betting man, I think the result would be a decline in usage - and that might be fine. If the model isn't working, that definitely needs addressing. But the companies most able to afford licensing are probably the ones least likely to pay for it.

Maybe the legal experts could sit down and work out how to modify licenses (including the GPL/LGPL) to be for non-commercial use only? As long as an entity wasn't making money using FOSS, it could use it just like now. Individuals and non-commercial projects wouldn't be affected. But if you're a business making money using FOSS? Not without paying for it you're not. Yes, this would go against the free-software principles. But principles don't pay the bills every month, and none of these changes would prevent anyone from staying with the existing licenses if they wanted to.

The first thing I think of as a problem would be a company setting up a separate entity that wouldn't make money, just make services available to the company using FOSS to get around the fees. The trick to preventing this would be to phrase the terms so that that entity truly had to pay it's own bills without having the company using it's services pay anything either directly or indirectly. Not even by doing things like providing hosting "free". I'd have to sit down with a bunch of rules lawyers and game out all the ways to funnel money into that entity and how to block them, but what's life without a little challenge?

That was always one of the suspension of disbelief breaking aspects of Star Trek, too. As if anyone would deal with all the responsibilities and risks involved in being a starship crew member when you could just fake the entire experience in a holosuite instead.

Of course, open source developers working on their own time have the worst of both worlds - along with the rest of us, they're not living in a Star Trek post-scarcity society, and they're also not getting paid. I've always been kind of surprised that the movement didn't immediately fizzle out. If anyone asked me to do more of the same tasks I perform during my day job, but for gratis during my free time, I'd tell them in some not-so-kind language exactly where they can stick it.

... then that project is really can't be described as open source anymore.

The same people who steal music, software, and videos now want others to pay for their work.

Vaughan-Nichols is right about the problem and wrong about the solution. Voluntary pledge funds and tip jars have existed for a decade and the 60% unpaid figure hasn't moved. Sentry is admirable precisely because it's an exception, the model doesn't scale because it depends on individual corporate virtue, which is in shorter supply than VC funding.

Perens' Post Open licensing approach is interesting but creates a two-tier ecosystem: "free for individuals, pay for commercial use" sounds clean until you realize it breaks the fundamental property that made open source eat the world. The moment a license is commercial-use-restricted, it's not open source, it's source-available, and enterprises will treat it accordingly (avoid it, fork it before the license change, or just use the last MIT-licensed version forever).

What's actually needed: mandatory contribution structured as a fee, not a license restriction. Here's one way to do it. Small flat fee on all US commercial revenue above $5M (the entire world runs on OSS, everyone pays to maintain it), larger marginal fee on companies whose products directly incorporate OSS. Fees flow into a scoring-based royalty pool: your project's share is proportional to how much commercial revenue depends on it, revenue-weighted so a hedge fund running its entire risk engine on a niche numerical library counts for more than fifty startups using the same package for weekend side projects. Maintainers register and claim their allocation like music royalties, no government agency decides who gets hired, just checks cut proportional to actual commercial stakes.

The core insight: you can't solve a collective action problem with voluntary action. You solve it by making the externality visible in the price.

Commercial access should definitely be charged, either in terms of money or developer contributions. If others want to profit off my work, they should have to share them with me, fairly

Would an executive at any big tech company go to a nice restaurant and not tip the waiter? Of course not, because it is expected for them to pay for the worth.

This needs to be the case in open source. To not frame it as “donations,” but that worth should be paid for.

But how do we start this? I would love to find like-minded folks to help build a Pay It for Worth campaign. We get businesses to sign a pledge to pay for worth and give them advertising so that we get customers to see who isn't freeloading. And we get a grassroots way for small businesses to take paying for open source to be a legitimate business expense they can deduct on their taxes, unlike the current donation limit they currently have to deal with.

so literally closing the source, or do you not know what the words mean

Honestly this is the stupidest article i've ever seen. The way to get open source maintainers paid is to make them the only source, ie to make open source software the only legal software. Which is a good idea anyway, because you are NOT a temporarily displaced millionaire, and the world would be better for it in ways you can't even imagine right now.

Concerned that the reason we keep doing open source is because we believe in access.

The false tradeoff there, is believing that access and exploitation are necessary corollaries. And I don't think they are.

It's a tough balance, and open source licenses have clearly failed us here.

But I'm not sure where to go with it. Shared source might be better, like the Mongo license, or something like it. The Kimi2 license had the right idea.

On the other hand, when you leave the open source path, you pay by losing acces

Don't get me wrong. I am not complaining about the idea open source developers being paid.

But very few people use open source, in any serious way. If they had to pay for it, a lot less people would use it. Eventually, it would not be worth maintaining.

Unless this is really about fidelity to economics and not software, can you imagine the pure engineering productivity unleashed if engineers had a decent guaranteed inflation-proofed basic income and didn't have to listen to bosses telling them to artificially restrict access and features due to advertiser pressure?