The Register: Open Source Isn't a Tip Jar - Time to Make Commercial Users Pay
It Is Time for Open Source Commercial Users to Pay Their Way
The Register has published a provocative opinion piece arguing that open source can no longer rely on charity from big tech companies. The article comes in response to $12.5 million in grants from Anthropic, AWS, GitHub, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI to the Linux Foundation.
The Math Doesn't Add Up
The author calculates that these companies (combined market cap ~$7.7 trillion) donating $12.5 million is equivalent to someone earning $100,000 giving 16 cents. Meanwhile:
- 60% of open source maintainers are unpaid
- 60% have quit or considered quitting due to burnout
- Only 26% of paid maintainers earn more than $1,000/year
- They would earn more asking "Would you like fries with that?"
The Real Cost: Infrastructure
Language registries (Maven Central, PyPI, npm, crates.io) handle trillions of package downloads per year. Maven Central CTO analysis shows:
- 82% of demand comes from fewer than 1% of IPs
- ~80% of traffic comes from major cloud providers
- These companies could run local mirrors but choose not to
AI Slop Tax on Maintainers
A new burden: only 5% of bug bounty submissions are genuine vulnerabilities. AI-generated security reports are flooding maintainers with garbage. cURL founder Daniel Stenberg shut down the bug bounty program due to "death by a thousand slops" damaging maintainer mental health.
The Proposed Solution
The code remains free, but commercial users downloading terabytes of packages should pay for access. This isn't about restricting the code - it is about covering the infrastructure costs that major enterprises are currently externalizing onto volunteer-run systems.