Nobody pays for FOSS, we can force them to

The essential infrastructure for most software development is held together by unpaid labor, leading to increasing risks of burnout and security vulnerabilities.

The economics of open-source software are discussed, highlighting a persistent outcome where free, permissive licenses like MIT and BSD win out over more restrictive ones. This is attributed to market dynamics where 'free wins share,' exemplified by companies like Elastic, HashiCorp, and Redis attempting to monetize their open-source projects only to be met with community forks that revert to open-source, often leading to acquisitions or pivots. The article posits that this 'free wins' equilibrium is stable but unsustainable due to the human cost on maintainers. A significant portion of open-source maintainers are unpaid and work in isolation, leading to burnout and a precarious dependency on a small number of developers for critical infrastructure. The accelerating pace of software development and security threats has exacerbated this issue, increasing the maintenance burden without a corresponding increase in compensation. Attempts to introduce funding mechanisms like GitHub Sponsors and foundations have largely failed to significantly alter this economic model, with most funding benefiting a few prominent projects rather than the broader maintainer base.

The core argument is that the 'free wins' model for open source is an evolutionarily stable strategy, meaning it's the market outcome that cannot be easily changed. While this model has successfully driven adoption and innovation, it places an unsustainable burden on individual maintainers. This stability, however, is achieved at a significant human cost, with a majority of maintainers working unpaid and facing burnout, creating a fragile ecosystem reliant on a small fraction of developers.

The increasing velocity of software development and security threats means the demands on maintainers have outpaced the traditional economic incentives. Existing funding models, such as sponsorships and foundations, have proven insufficient to rebalance this equation, often benefiting only a select few projects. This suggests a fundamental tension between the cooperative nature of open source and the economic realities of maintaining complex, critical software in a rapidly evolving landscape.