Open source isn't a tip jar – it's time to charge for access

Summary

Opinion Time and again, I see people begging for companies with deep pockets to fund open source projects. I mean, after all, they've made billions from this code. You'd think they could support the code's creators and maintainers. It would be only fair, right? Screw fair. Screw asking for dimes. You can't live off one-off charity donations. Trust me, I've been on the boards of several small nonprofits. Dpending on what people put in a tip jar is no way to fund anything of value. So you'll excuse me if I'm not blown away by the fact that Anthropic, AWS, GitHub, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and others – total market cap in the ballpark of $7.7 trillion – have donated $12.5 million in grants to the Linux Foundation, OpenSSF, and Alpha‑Omega. If you make $100,000 a year, that's about 16 cents. Color me unimpressed. Mind you, many open source developers never see an annual income that large. Indeed, according to a 2024 Tidelift maintainer report, 60 percent of open source maintainers are unpaid, and 60 percent have quit or considered quitting, largely due to burnout and lack of compensation. Oh, and of those getting paid, only 26 percent earn more than $1,000 a year for their work. They'd be better paid asking "Would you like fries with that?" at your local McDonald's. It's not just the developers who are underpaid and unappreciated. Anyone building modern software depends on language registries such as Maven Central, PyPI, npm, crates.io, and others, which collectively handle on the order of trillions of package downloads a year. Yes, I said "trillions." Sonatype CTO Brian Fox recently told me that Maven Central, the Java registry, has delivered hundreds of billions of downloads, yet it runs on a shoestring" in terms of funding, staff, and infrastructure.​ The load comes overwhelmingly from large users, not hobbyists. Fox's analysis shows that 82 percent of Maven Central demand comes from fewer than 1 percent of IPs, with roughly 80 percent of traffic sourced from the la...