It's indeed ridiculous how the world's trillion dollar private companies run on essential software that idealistic open-source maintainers build basically for free while scrambling to even make basic income.
I'm all for open ideals, but we shouldn't be as naive to ignore how stuff we build on these ideals - if offered completely free - will eventually almost exclusively profit only those private entities that best know how to use them, hide them in a 'proprietary chain' and use VC capital to invest more in PR, markting and sales than engineering to reap all the benefits off them.
Therefore, I think, the original problem was that most software wasn't automatically defaulting to a limited-commercial (e.g. business of > million revenue must pay for usage in their product) or AGPL licenses that would benefit all - by either allowing maintainers to get a share from the success the helped build, or making the resulting products build on top, instead of private profit, available freely to all.
True. It's really cases like this that demonstrate the shortcomings of BSD/MIT licenses -- at least if you are of the position, that companies could and should contribute a sliver of profits back to the projects enabling that success.
(Much like contributing back in taxes for the infrastructure used and the educational system producing the qualified employees. But that may be a bridge too far for some of HNs readership :) )
Is it actually a shortcoming? People choose to use these licences. They explicitly say the companies can use it free with no obligation. Most are happy with that choice and say so. If they were not happy they can change the license for new code. They could use a license unpalatable to those companies and dual license with a paid alternative
Last week someone had left bags of apples left on their wall with a note asking people to take a bag. I guess their tree produced more than they wanted. I took one. I feel no obligation to pay them for it. An MIT license is the same thing applied to software.
One; you are a private individual- not the local shop which simultaneously picks up all free apples only to turn around and make money off of them.
Secondly, while we can’t speak to everyone picking any open source license - there are good examples of people complaining that they are stressed because they either are underfunded or having to maintain critical infrastructure pieces in their spare time - because companies aren’t donating in exchange for the free code.
You can say “don’t”, but the openssl, xz, … maintainers are often aware how much can break if they don’t keep at it - and so for a sense of societal duty they continue.
If your neighbor stops hanging bags of apples by their house it’s not like they have a reasonable expectation that someone is going to die from starvation or anything.
The comparison is valid because it is voluntary. If you give something away free you cannot complain if people take you at your word. Donating is an act of charity, not an act of exchange. I agree the companies should give back, but that is not how the world currently works.
What I do not understand is why projects that are short of money continue to use those licenses. Relicense to GPL 3 or AGPL 3 so small businesses and individuals can use it unhindered, and offer a paid license to those averse to that.
As xz demonstrated, maintaining for free out of a sense of obligation is not always good for society.
If you give something away free you cannot complain if people take you at your word
that's not the problem. the problem is that the people using the software then turn around and complain about bugs. but fixing bugs in a timely manner was not included in the free giveaway.
companies shouldn't give back because they get a benefit, they should give back because they expect continued maintenance.
projects aren't short on money because they give away their code for free. they are short on money because those users demand support without paying for that.
and they can't change the license because there is no license that allows anyone to modify and redistribute the code but can demand payment for maintenance. if they change the license people would stop using it, and the project would be dead. (or forked)
GPL 3 or AGPL do not help with this problem. it might stop a few big businesses, but again, it would stop them from using it, not motivate them to pay for it. (it might, now that they are already using it, but if that was the initial license , they would never have used it to begin with.
the only way to achieve what you want would be to start with a permissive license and then change the license later. but that is not workable. it would upset and alienate to many people and motivate some to fork the project. not to forget that once you have contributors, license changes are hard to do.
> that's not the problem. the problem is that the people using the software then turn around and complain about bugs. but fixing bugs in a timely manner was not included in the free giveaway.
Agreed, but there is no obligation on them to do it. Even if they feel a social obligation they could, for example, only fix security issues that affect most users and do not have a workaround.
> GPL 3 or AGPL do not help with this problem. it might stop a few big businesses, but again, it would stop them from using it
The big businesses are the one who should pay if they use it, right? What are they going to use instead? It would be cheaper to pay a licensing fee than to develop their own alternatives to things like OpenSSL or xz (the examples given that I was replaying to).
Edit: also, if you look up the thread I was replying to someone who specifically said the problem was with MIT style licences. At the very least GPL licences will prevent them using without contributing back their own fixes and, with GPL3, also has other positive effects.
> it might, now that they are already using i
but the problem is that they are mostly not doing so, right?
Agreed, and furthermore, I would imagine since some projects (thinking ghostty, linux, and others) are non-profits there are tax incentives for donating and supporting. Software stacks are still neglected, and that points to inefficiencies (companies and corps not valuing open source) and willful malice (hiding them in the "proprietary chain"), and just general abuse of the commons (take and don't pay).
AI has made the "hard" things more important. Everyone can now build an e-commerce website or demo, but the utilities, OSes, and browsers now serve as the base of those projects. They are beginning to be overwhelmed, whether it be through AI bug reports, exponential load on some platforms, or other indirect factors, and there isn't much relief in sight.
We need a large re-alignment of Math, Software and Sciences. I'm not elucidating anything new here, simply musing. Science and math workers can be focused on replication and application, and software expertise focuses on the "foundational" systems.
> It's indeed ridiculous how the world's trillion dollar private companies run on essential software that idealistic open-source maintainers build basically for free while scrambling to even make basic income.
The most ridiculous thing is that idealistic open-source maintainers are still doing it, while this is being an established status quo for at least 30 years. Or maybe they have their incentive, and, while I don't find it palatable too, large corporations understands that. What's _your_ incentive in having such strong opinions about that ?
If not open source, the company will make their own alternative, costing negligible resources relative to its size. The only people who lose out are other small developers who can’t so easily.
Honestly the most ridiculous part is that open-source maintainership is so easy to monetize.
All you have to do is declare a simple ULTIMATUM.MD:
I hereby guarantee that all project maintenance work will be deferred indefinitely if there are insufficient funds to continue maintenance work.
Project costs are split fairly according to a simple formula: pledge = maintenance budget / participants.
Pledgers can set a private maximum total bid during the campaign window. Generous pledgers can optionally set the maximum number of pledges they grant the project within their total bid.
I guarantee that received funds will not be used to build up project savings to extend the maintenance window beyond the funded window and that there will be no simultaneous campaigns to secure funding for future time periods beyond the current funded window.
I guarantee that the pledger's identity, maximum total bid, number of pledges, will be kept private to protect them from pledge analysis attacks that automatically infer the pledger budgets to calculate the maximum free rider potential.
I guarantee to always keep the project at the brink of abandonment to preserve the value of the pledges.
Hint: A rational pledger would consider these conditions amazing because all of them preserve their investment while protecting them from freeriders. 99% of the strategy here is to shift the freerider problem onto the pledger by guaranteeing that the project will be shut down, but this leaves the pledgers vulnerable to freeriders who analyse who is willing to fund the project to avoid funding it themselves.
Hint 2: You cannot fork your way out of this. At best you can have competing maintainers who underbid each other using ULTIMATUM.MD.
I’m sorry, I find this really difficult to follow. You seem to alternate between using pledgers and participants, and it’s not clear what a pledge is versus a bid, or how pledgers make multiple pledges?
Is there a real world example of this sort of funding model you can point to?
> idealistic open-source maintainers build basically for free while scrambling to even make basic income.
Maybe these maintainers could simply cease doing all this free work? There are other ways to make a living. Perhaps even doing the same thing but with better negotiation skills. No one is forcing anyone to do this. The reality is that if 100% of the tzdb and SQLite teams disappeared today, Microsoft and Google would have these projects back under stable operation before the weekend.
We cannot expect a realistic economy to arbitrarily compensate people who originally did not seek compensation without a lot of really bad side effects. Does anyone on HN have any actual evidence that the maintainers of truly load bearing infrastructure (billions of devices+) are genuinely struggling economically?
Maybe some countries could pay stipend to software developers who do that? I mean, this open source software enables other companies to produce cheaper software and to earn more money and they pay taxes from that money, so tiny bit of these taxes could also be redistributed back to some independent developers.
Then I am going to have to complain that the trillion dollar tech firms contribute no taxes while middle class joes pay a stipend to the people who built the software that they depend on to be trillion dollar companies
There's still the problem of how, precisely, we're going to force the rich to pay those taxes out of their own wealth, rather than them simply offloading them in the form of increased prices for the products and services their companies provide, which increased prices are then paid for by the weakest chain in the link: private end consumers, aka the middle class.
There may be a way, but it isn't self evident what that way may be.
And that prevents them from calling the company and ordering them to increase prices so that they can then use the extra income to pay those capital taxes... how?
> Maybe some countries could pay stipend to software developers who do that?
Why should the public make up for private savings? Hey billionaire x does not like to spend for his software, let's all raise some funds so he does not have to.
With my OpenBSD developer hat on, getting new hardware in the hands of developers is really important, many of us are hacking on 5-10 year old thinkpads that need replacing.
Shamelessly, if I may add a personal plea, in addition to funding the open source projects you use, if you can, please do consider directly supporting individual contributors/developers personally who work on those projects, many are volunteers and even a small monthly contribution could mean the difference.
Out of curiosity I asked Codex to build a version of this article that can be read/scrolled in a normal way while preserving the original graphics/text. Codex built it in about 10min with GPT-6.1 Sol High (consumed 8% of my 5h quota). It even thought of adding a dark/light mode switcher which is useful too. It still needs a few prompts of minor polishing, but already more readable to me.
What I’m curious about is, then, how should this problem be handled? Actually, there’s a point I’m somewhat curious about.
For projects with a bus factor of 1 or very low, and in a supply chain like this, there’s a somewhat difficult point regarding what kind of system should be established so that the core developers maintaining that kind of core receive appropriate compensation.
That’s true, after all. Technically very new or challenging technologies get the spotlight from many people, but these technologies are very important yet are a kind of engine technology that is less visible... I’m curious how this should be identified or selected.
That said, if you set up a committee, the committee could also become an inner circle based on their personal connections.
The devs should send emails asking for a couple million each to all the large tech companies while reminding them how much their utility is being used for their product. I think a lot of them will donate the money. It’s lesser than chump change to them.
I remember when the maintainer of an open source XML library contacted dozens of companies for support to fix a critical vulnerability, and most of them didn't even respond and aside from two the rest went basically "not our problem, get lost".
A handful of companies probably care a bit but most won't bother to pay even a penny.
There’s a difference between assigning resources to a problem and taking on the responsibility for a utility and just donating money no strings attached with no accountability and potential positive press.
It was possible to just donate money with no strings attached actually, and one of the two companies that helped did just that. And positive press was also involved.
Sorry to be harsh but, dev gets hit by bus, project is forked, people move on.
I'm sympathetic to this topic but I hate the framing. "The people holding up the internet" includes thousands of people at Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and yes, some volunteers too who are doing as a hobby.
They are free to give it up and stop doing it. Some person or company will pick it up.
It’s not a failure of corporate. It’s a failure of community. Would it be better if all internet infrastructure would be controlled by corporate? I would argue: no, it wouldn’t.
Perhaps It should be NPOs like ISOC or IETF that supports private open source engagement into internet infrastructure ?
This page has a11y problems. Reader mode fixes those but hides all the graphics, only text and pictures remain. Such a waste of an otherwise good article.
A specific screw in a car can be crucial, but at the same time it's cheep, replaceable and easy to reproduce. When describing the achievement of a car you would never put this particular screw at the top.
I don't mean that the achievement of those people is unimportant, but dislike when people mix up the idea of "dependence out of convenience" vs "dependence out of necessity".
These aren't simple pad left functions. Good luck making a Core-JS on your own. All of these are crucial to basically everything continuing to work - and more importantly massive security risks if their maintainers stop.
what do you mean by "making on your own"? The first example(time zone db) is portrayed as "holding up" 4B android/iPhone devices, and Google/Apple for sure have the capacity to create something "on their own".
Did you go and read the tzdb? Go ahead, it’s on github. There is so much amazing historical info in there, clearly many years of research went into making it.
Apple/Google can create something that works somehow, but they can’t replace the knowledge that went into making tzdb. And whatever they make won’t be universally accepted.
I had Claude whip up Fundcli a bunch of months ago. It goes through your atuin shell history and suggests places to donate to based on what you've been using.
I'm working on something similar for a PyCon talk.
While I agree that there is a problem of recognition and appreciation, I also feel like the spirit of making a small contribution without expecting a return is what enables the open whole source ecosystem that many of us benefit from.
This article is biased towards open source developers and ignores all the employees at tier 1 backbones who are the ones actually holding up the internet.
The difference is that the employees at tier 1 backbone providers get paid, and if one of them quits, there is an organization responsible (and incentivized) to hire and train replacements.
So what? That doesn't make those people, the software they write, or the actions they take any less important at keeping the internet functioning. The work employees do seem to constantly be downplayed since they often are not working out in the public, nor are they making public blog posts advertising what they are doing.
You have seemingly missed the point of the article entirely, while also becoming offended for... I'm not even sure. Not being mentioned maybe? The internet will never cease to be a rich vein of absolutely baffling behavior
These people aren't holding up the Internet. The software they built is doing that.
It's like how your house isn't its blueprint.
Writing software isn't the same as running it. Software maintenance work doesn't scale with the size of the user base.
For software you don't operate yourself, the scaling factors have nothing to do with where it runs or why or when. You're isolated from the number of installs, since you don't operate those installs, you don't keep them updated or bring them back when they go down. That burden is borne by vendors.
Sensationalist takes are great for clicks, but there is no "there" there. If this was a true economic failure it'd have been fixed long ago.
My bet is these maintainers aren't in it for the money. After all they're not currently dead of starvation, so by definition they're okay. Not billionaires, but okay.
And that's okay! Not everyone wants to be a billionaire. Some people just wanna be that person in Nebraska thanklessly keeping the planet on axis.
I'm all for open ideals, but we shouldn't be as naive to ignore how stuff we build on these ideals - if offered completely free - will eventually almost exclusively profit only those private entities that best know how to use them, hide them in a 'proprietary chain' and use VC capital to invest more in PR, markting and sales than engineering to reap all the benefits off them.
Therefore, I think, the original problem was that most software wasn't automatically defaulting to a limited-commercial (e.g. business of > million revenue must pay for usage in their product) or AGPL licenses that would benefit all - by either allowing maintainers to get a share from the success the helped build, or making the resulting products build on top, instead of private profit, available freely to all.