SECURITY Signal 239 2 feeds carried it
License restrictions fail to fund open source; article argues registries could force payment
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Illustration only Photo by Akhilesh Sharma on Unsplash
An essay argues that permissive open source licensing is a stable market equilibrium that license restrictions cannot shift, and proposes registries as an alternative mechanism to compel payment for open source work.
Sixty percent of open source maintainers are unpaid and nearly 60% have considered quitting, threatening the infrastructure most engineering teams depend on. Understanding why license-based funding attempts consistently fail helps teams evaluate which sustainability models might actually work.
Written by elseif from the cluster below · every claim links back to a sourceThe three things worth knowing
Every major attempt to restrict open source licenses resulted in a successful fork that reverted to permissive terms, including cases from Facebook, Elastic, HashiCorp, and Redis.
Permissive licensing is an evolutionarily stable strategy because a fully open competitor always undercuts a restricted one on cost.
The article proposes registries as a mechanism to force payment, operating at the distribution layer rather than the license layer.
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