Nobody pays for open source. We can force them to.

Nobody pays for FOSS, we can force them to

The author frames open source as an evolutionarily stable strategy where permissive licenses always win—React, Elasticsearch, Terraform, and Redis all retreated from restrictive licensing after forks took over. The cost is human burnout: 60% of maintainers are unpaid, 5% of developers produce 96% of the value, and the xz backdoor showed how fragile that is. The system isn't breaking; it's stable at a level of suffering we've accepted. The post then proposes using package registries as a mechanism to force payment.