Nobody pays for open source. We can force them to.
What happened
作者用演化博弈打了个比方：闭源是鹰，开源是鸽，市场最终稳定在“随便用、免费、可商用”的宽松许可证上。React、Elasticsearch、Terraform、Redis 都试过收紧许可，全被分叉打回去了——免费赢份额，闭源赢利润，两边都算赢。但免费这层的代价是人：60% 的维护者没报酬，5% 的开发者产出了 96% 的价值，xz 后门事件就是靠一个快...
Coverage
Follow the reports to see the story from different sides.
- Hacker News front pageNobody pays for open source. 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.