I agree wholeheartedly that the big users are leeching off of the efforts of those in the FOSS world.

I also agree that having a centralised funding agency would be of benefit to all concerned.

What worries me is that when this has been done in other spheres, such as music, we end up with the likes of the Performing Rights Society and their counterparts in other parts of the world. These organisations seem to be the equivalent of self-licking ice cream cones with no other purpose than their own survival.

If it is decided that a collection agency is to be set up, careful consideration must be given to ensuring that the terms and regulations under which it would operate are strictly spelled out, and provisions put in place to rein in any attempts to stray from the original purpose.

> we end up with the likes of the Performing Rights Society and their counterparts in other parts of the world. These organisations seem to be the equivalent of self-licking ice cream cones with no other purpose than their own survival.

There's several studies on how bureacracies tend to self perpetuate; there's a study somewhere on how the UK's foreign office actually grew during the post-WW2 period, even as the UK actively downsized it's empire and staff came back from the (ex) colonies. Jobs for the boys, and all that.

Things are even more interesting when it comes to charities. For example, Oxfam claims to spend just 10p per pound on operating overheads, with a further 11p going towards "investments" such as fundraisers. Or 21p per pound.

Which comes to around £80 million of their annual revenues of about £400 million, some of which is spent on approx. 4000 employees.

Conversely, Shelter states that it spends 27p per pound. And there's a somewhat snarky (and potentially biased) report here which suggests the real number could be around 39p, though I haven't verified that by digging into the accounts myself.

https://landlordassociation.org.uk/follow-the-money-what-shelters-own-accounts-reveal/

Either way, they only earn around £80 million in revenue annually, so there's presumably some degree of "fixed overheads" to help explain why they spend more than Oxfam.

And then there's PRS.

I did dig out their accounts from 2024, and they do make for fairly interesting reading.

First, their transparency report states that their operating overheads around around 12%[*]:

https://www.prsformusic.com/-/media/files/prs-for-music/corporate/financials/2024/prs-annual-transparency-report-2024.ashx

However, that's also against a total revenue of over £1.15 billion , which puts their annual costs at around £140 million per year .

Or to put it another way: their costs are nearly double that for Oxfam, despite the fact that their revenue is nearly three times higher and their employee headcount is eight times smaller than Oxfam's , at around 500 people.

Admittedly, a bit more poking did turn up at least one reason for this: on page 28 of their 2024 annual statement, it shows that the CEO renumeration was increased from £398,000 in 2020, to £1,131,000 in 2024:

https://www.prsformusic.com/-/media/files/prs-for-music/corporate/financials/2024/prsfm-annual-report-and-financial-statements-2024.ashx)

I'm sure that PRS has some very believable explanations as to why the CEO receives that much, and why their operating costs are so high. But I can't help but think that this is a prime example of an entrenched "self-licking ice cream"!

Especially since they have far fewer overheads than Oxfam and Shelter - there's no national chain of charity shops to support, nor are they running fundraisers or organising support for their particular subject matter. All PRS does (to somewhat simplify) is to take money from companies who use music, keep a rough track of what songs have been played, and then feed that into a database which spits out how much each individual artist has earned.

[*] Allegedly, this has now dropped to 9%, though at a glance, I suspect this may be more due to growth in revenue, rather than the introduction of any cost-saving efficiencies!

What's the word for charging for something which used to be free. Oh, yes, it's "enshittification". How would the nlFOSS world avoid that?

That word doesn't mean what you think it means.

Having to pay for a thing you benefit from isn't wrong. It's the way the world should work.

That's... subjective, and depends on how much you can pay.

FOSS should be free for individuals, not-for-profits and charities where businesses pay.

1% of what was thrown into Android development alone would support Open Source initiates for decades.

We have a licensing system for that - it's called commercial software. You've just taken the F out of FOSS.

No - enshittification is taking something that used to be good (for a given value of 'good') and making it worse to generate greater short-term profit. A key point is that the product was already a paid product (somewhere along the line, not necessarily with the end-user.)

It is not requiring corporations to pay for OSS.

By avoiding tracking, advertising, and paying to unlock functionality. I don't this article is proposing any of that.

This would seem to be one possible option, but I don't know how it could be arranged.

The only way that corporations will start paying is if the code stops flowing. Time for Open Source contributors to form a union and go on strike?

Developers and maintainers grow older and retreat from the combat and the implicit assumption new young upcoming talent will take up the responsibility is not questioned... yet.

With the ceaseless rounds of layoffs in the ranks of professional developers so fashionable at the moment the attraction to this career has basically evaporated and with it the reason for new developers to work on open source to enhance their employability.

Within a few years I suspect the only really active open source projects will be manned by supply chain vulnerability specialists courtesy of a wide choice of the usual suspects.

Big Tech you can either rescue the open source you make a motza from by opening your wallet and shooing away the moths or you will have to maintain your own fork entirely in·house at much greater expense (and even greater futility if you think AI is up to the job.)

Like most catastrophes this will oscillate wildly around the precipice before the whole shemozzle tumbles into the abyss.

Humanity are largely not big thinkers - dumb arses and nongs mostly, but the unfathomable stupidity of large multinational corporations (especially American) drag that lack of neural processing to whole new depths. The mindless greed is truly and literally diabolical. Evil in a word.

understand the price of everything but the value of nothing.

If they understood what an outage in an open source component would cost them that a donation to the maintainer could have helped them avoid - they might worry, but prolly not -- after all the proprietary s/ware that they pay a lot is, supposedly, maintained -- so why not the open source s/ware ?

Some of it could be ignorance: how many of us tell those we work for what free s/ware we use ? Almost no one.

I see a few problems with this: first, that the frequent political imbroglios in the OSS community will mean that nobody is ever happy about how much is paid to whom; second, that as long as being a contributor to an OSS project counts for portfolio points, there will be an infinite supply of replacement-level programmers perfectly willing to do it for free. After all, you can't stop anyone from forking it.

What if it was treated like a charitable donation at tax time and you could deduct hours of OSS work at some reasonable equivalent salary from your top-line income?

That would be nice. There are people it wouldn't work for. If you don't have much of an income, then it's less valuable to offset it, so someone who lost a job and filled in the gap with work on this software would benefit less, but that's a smaller problem. As alluring as the option might be, I don't think it will or even could be successfully implemented in law. Any attempt is likely to have some large loopholes or restrictions and no politician would care much because they don't understand how important this is.

Yep, that would be ripe for abuse. Ask Claude to build a project with 2 million lines of code, publish it as OSS on Github, claim you've spent 500 hours of work on it and cash in the tax break.

You can probably claim something already through R&D tax credits. IANAA.

My comment history regarding this topic should be well known by now, I've been on my soapbox about this topic for years whilst everyone was parroting the "FOSS" concept. Desktop FOSS will never reach true competition with commercial products because the development incentive just isn't there; it is nice to say that GIMP and other packages are alternatives to commercial but that simply is not the truth, and their development is held back by the very limits of the current FOSS economy.

That is, most developers who work on packages outside the majors like the kernel, plus select others that are proclaimed useful by interests that monetize Linux, do so by their grace of time. And since their time is money, and they get no money, their time takes a back seat to the other demands that life gives them. They get overwhelmed. They reduce their input. They burn out.

Hard work at the face of the coding wall can't go on as a charity or as a challenge to be personally overcome. People's lives are just too complicated to expect that to continue forever.

Open source is a technological commons. By definition.

Governments should fund the growth of that commons, just like they fund science, art, education, transportation, public safety, and a lot of other things we benefit from without immediately swiping our card beforehand.

The amount of money needed to create a robust and thriving open source ecosystem is a rounding error compared to how wealthy nations already spend their budgets, much of which ends up wasted.

It would be interesting to see which governments do the funding and which to the freeloading.

It would be interesting to see which governments do the funding and which to the freeloading.

Interesting perhaps. Surprising no.

USA? Hell no! That would be unamerican. Unto Satan Avowed.

Never pay for anything you can cheat, steal, extort or murder your way with.

That would certainly be true while the USA is ruled by the current klepto-president. Hopefully the next change will be better in all respects.

One of the biggest practical problems.

In politics, people often oppose things which are in their own interests just to spite the free riders. Unfortunately, many governments just aren't familiar with how beneficial open source is to their economy, which makes it much easier for the rational brain to surrender to the visceral fear of free riders elsewhere benefiting. If the politician is running for reelection, their "no" might be the result of nothing more than needing a free rider to oppose and demagogue against much more than they need support from those supportive of the underlying policy.

Would probably guess Europe, as they're more supportive of science and the commons (especially with Trump in the US), but I could also see Big Tech's lobbyists getting the government to start funding many of the libraries (not competitors) which their products rely on.

The problem with government grants is that it makes development beholden to the government.

The state of California isn't going to be interested in funding FOSS projects that develop tools to defeat or bypass California's demand that operating systems impose age verification, for example.

Not necessarily. A government can depoliticize open source funding if it wants.

Create an open source grant review board composed of longtime FOSS leaders and well-respected academics. Choose people whose integrity and personal commitment has been demonstrated over decades. Let them vote on it. Better yet, let them devise a new algorithm for allocating billions more efficiently than simple up-or-down votes.

I'm not worried about taxpayer money being wasted or development being beholden to government if folks like Linus Torvalds and Daniel Bernstein are the ones making collaborative decisions on grant funding.

I totally agree with your point of view! Governments should agree on international taxation so no outrageous "legal" tax evasion occur and that way be possible to found the Open Source projects that benefits us all.

As much as I see the advantages of having a better (or at all) funded Open Source development and maintenance, any form of mandatory payment for the big players would have to kill the "Open" first, as you'd need to spell out specific usage restrictions in the license.

So, enforcing this kind of revenue stream would actually kill Open Source.

There are already many licenses for releasing code with commercially limited openness, that require companies to pay for licenses if they use covered code commercially, however, are products under those licenses really regarded as being better maintained? I fail to come up with actual examples of widely used, well maintained software under a limited open license.

On the other hand, receiving payments would - in the next step - raise expectations placed on the support. So maintainers of tens of thousands of projects might come under even more pressure to fix/modify code, just as their commercial counterparts - regardless of the probably minimal payments they could receive under such a scheme.

We are indeed stuck between a rock and a hard place right now.

The concept of a "professional" open source developer was kind of tacked on to the whole idea. If everyone is a hobbyist like originally intended, everything works. The problem was when giant corporations started using these projects, making trillions of dollars from hobbyist work hat was intentionally licensed for freedom of use.

The absolute opposite would be for these corporations to go completely closed source, but then we're right back where we started with no trust in what's being done with the black box software we use.

I don't claim to have he answer, if I did we would t be discussing this. But there's got to be a middle ground somewhere.

...as long as the code is to remain "open". You try and enforce any kind of paywall at any stage and there's always someone who can fork the code, release it for free, and then become the defacto owner because people will flock to the free offering over the paid one.

Open source runs on the concepts of a collective public benefit and good will all around. Private corporations operate on the exact opposite principle - what's mine is mine and I will guard it jealously.

I can't see any way to square this particular circle.

But then who would fork the code and bear the maintenance and infrastructure costs if they don't have large pockets or a source of funding themselves?

This would literally kill open source. If you have to pay to use it, it's not open any more.

No, what we really need is for open source developers to realize that garbage licenses like BSD are a huge problem. Switch everything you're working on to the GNU Affero General Public License to force the freeloaders to release any changes they make even if they just put the changed software on a server and don't distribute it. Stop using licenses that let trillion dollar corporations take and not give back.

Stop recognizing licenses like BSD as open.

You can do that, and developers already know that and choose whether to do so, but it doesn't do much about many of the problems described in the article. Getting the release of patches won't do anything to fund the servers that distribute the official version everyone else is using, nor will it ease the burden on the people doing most of the maintenance. The release of the code won't help with that either because anyone who didn't already upstream their changes isn't going to help to do so, they're just going to publish their version, so any use of the changed code is extra work for the original maintainers. I don't have a good solution to the financial and resourcing problems that many open source projects face, but getting more code out of companies, whether or not you can, isn't going to fix it.

Also, unavailable modifications is not often a big problem in comparison. In my experience, people who make changes to open source software in house are generally split into two categories:

1. People who make a massive new piece of software around an original open source component. They don't want to release their code, and many of them find a way not to by how they interact with that component. We can dislike that, and in my experience, some of the people who choose to do this are already violating licenses to manage it, but even if they started releasing all their stuff, it wouldn't do anything to ease the maintenance problem. The extra free software would be nice though.

2. People who make improvements to a piece of software, adding a feature or fixing some bugs. These people often want to upstream their changes because they don't want the maintenance burden. If the original project includes the feature they built because they need it, then it will stay working with the next update. They're already releasing their code in most cases, with stupid legal teams being the most common reason why it doesn't happen.

I agree, there is a problem with the very generous licenses.

If people started using licenses such as AGPL and then dual license it in a more limited way. But the twist would be to tie that other license to an organization that is responsible for collecting and redistribute fees among developers. This already works for music creators. Here in Sweden we have Stim that does this for music creators. https://www.stim.se/en/om-oss/fa-koll-pa-stim/how-stim-works

But at what point must "commercial" developers pay?

At what point do the three startup developers stop coding and experience the joy of corporate license accounting? Before or after they get their first major funding round? Will the license have exceptions for when executives are roommates, or if they eat enough cheap pizza in any given quarter? Is there also an exception for an unidentified dude on the Internet who wants to remain an unidentified (and unincorporated) dude on the Internet if the thing he built suddenly gets really popular?

I think most people here wish Zuckerberg or Ellison would pull their own weight in FOSS, but is spiting them worth the burden on all those who shouldn't be bearing it?

Freedom and relief from license worry are the very point of open source. Take that away, and it's just a different take on freemium.

This is nothing to do with BSD licences.

An example given in this article is Maven... which uses the Apache licence. Granted, that is a BSD 'style' licence, but so what? That does not stop the problem of humungous numbers of downloads from small numbers of IPs.

I would rate limit and cap the number of downloads per IP. It's the only way to make people take notice. A redirect notice to a page: You have had 100 downloads from this IP today. Try again tomorrow, or cough up some money to cover our hosting costs.

Block access to all AWS, Azure, GC IPs. See what happens. Next time the all hands call I’ll ask management: what brought most value? AI or the open source we use on our code and everywhere? The irony of the $1T being spent on this bubble.

This article conflates the two. OS development, that's an issue I care about, and charging companies to prioritise fix X or similar is probably the way to go.

The unnecessarily complex infrastructure that has grown up around open source, where Sonatype, NPM etc replace the need to manually keep up-to-date with your dependencies (a problem) with the ability to depend on tens of thousands of packages of unknown provenance (a bigger problem). I have very little sympathy for them, nor the build systems that enable them (Maven, spits on floor).

I appreciate not everyone wants to write their own ICU package, but pulling in (eg) Apache Commons just because you want to have a slightly nicer IO interface is the wrong approach in my book. And as evidence of this I cite Log4J, XZ, and all the recent crap that's been going on with NPM. If you can't manage your dependencies manually, you have too many.

You act like package repositories are a new thing. Not only are they quite old as open source goes, but they don't go away when you manually maintain your dependencies. The code still has to come from somewhere when you get copies. People could easily script a retrieval even when it was a tarball in an Apache directory listing you were supposed to manually retrieve, and even manual retrievals at the scale that people download things can be quite costly. Development and distribution are quite different, but why should one be unimportant?

The unnecessarily complex infrastructure that has grown up around open source, where Sonatype, NPM etc replace the need to manually keep up-to-date with your dependencies (a problem) with the ability to depend on tens of thousands of packages of unknown provenance (a bigger problem).

Absolutely. I use Hugo (a static site generator) for a small site. I set it up years ago. You write in markdown, run hugo and it spits out a static HTML site (including RSS, sitemap, etc) that I upload via FTP. If you're using a theme someone else has written (which many do), you just drop that in /themes/ and specify in the toml or yaml file which theme to pull in. No dev required as such.

Recently I had cause to create a new site, which called for a slightly different (gallery/image-oriented) template. Imagine my surprise when, in trying to download my selected theme, the instructions were all along the lines "add this module to your toml with "https://github.com//" blah blah blah

Moreover, the [1]"quickstart" now reads "install hugo" and "install git".

No. Feck off. Git is not a prerequisite to using Hugo, but they now go out their way to make it sound like it is. I don't have git installed on my system and I don't want to install it. I don't have anything against it - I can see the value of source control for teams. But I just have a folder of markdown and template files that I want to run hugo against reliably and consistently. If the author unpublishes the repo, I want it to continue working (without update, but that's no problem). My interest (in this case) is in writing, not web development. I want a relatively simple system that builds my writing into a site, without having to manually update menus, article lists or the sitemap. That's what I need the SSG for. It ought to be getting out of my way as much as possible, without trying to get me to build some ever-so-clever CI pipeline for this thing I use once a month...

Now, it turns out you can still do this, but it's less obvious which folders ought to be copied where (unless you already know the "old" way of doing things). The docs and happy path are all "hey, pull stuff in as modules from github on demand". The theme I wanted didn't provide an easy