The people holding up the internet
sheets.works
sheets.works
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.
(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 :) )
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.
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.
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 ?
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.
Is there a real world example of this sort of funding model you can point to?
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?
There may be a way, but it isn't self evident what that way may be.
What would prevent abuse of this kind of program?
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.
That happens with linux, if businesses don't want their supply chain to vanish.
But, hey, we are trying communism :)
Now AI has made software abundant, there really isn't any need to pay maintainers really.
Enterprises can just fork it, rebuild the software for their own needs and not contribute anything back.
Even if the license is AGPL, they ignore it anyway and it is unenforceable.
In the age of AI, vibe coding and cloning software, I don’t think this matters anymore.
https://www.openbsd.org/want.html
The OpenBSD foundation is ~23% away from its fundraising goal for 2026, which helps support developer hackathons and project infrastructure, etc.
https://www.openbsdfoundation.org/campaign2026.html
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.
The xz story is so depressing. The only person who stepped up to help him was someone trying to plant a backdoor...
Only made it a couple of "pages" in and had to close the tab entirely because of the convoluted animated presentation.
None of it felt like it was in service of anything other than screaming "look how neat this is!" which is just terribly distracting.
Perhaps It should be NPOs like ISOC or IETF that supports private open source engagement into internet infrastructure ?
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.
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.
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.
A handful of companies probably care a bit but most won't bother to pay even a penny.
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.
All this gatekeeping. All this hypothetical "I could totally have done it better".
Celebrating people who DO things is worthwhile.
The loud ones only take the credit.
(Londo Mollari, "In The Beginning")
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.
OSS is a strategy, not a business model, and it is certainly not a good lifestyle for developers.
I'm the exception that proves the rule, perhaps. Or maybe not. I don't know, and I suspect you don't know either.
Now it has gotten cheaper and cheaper with AI, to the point that OSS software can now be vibe coded and rebuilt in hours.
Why pour all that money in an OSS developer when you can vibe code your own?