Seldo proposes forcing payment for open-source software
A developer argues the free-software market is unsustainable and sketches a mechanism to compel funding.
What to know
- Seldo argues open-source software is trapped in an evolutionarily stable market equilibrium where permissive free licenses dominate because attempts to charge are defeated by forks.
- The author proposes a mechanism to force payment for FOSS, though the full proposal is not yet visible in available excerpts (details are in a section about registries).
- The post draws on evolutionary biology (hawk-dove game theory) to explain why free software wins market share while closed source wins profits, and why this equilibrium appears unbreakable under current rules.
Seldo Software developer and essayist
How it unfolded 1 development · click the chart to see its coverage articlesposts
-
1
Essay reaches Hacker News front page
The post appeared on Hacker News with early traction, garnering discussion among the developer community about the sustainability of open-source funding models.
“The equilibrium we've landed on is very specific. The evolutionarily stable strategy for a piece of software is "anybody may use this for anything, including commercially, for free."”
— Seldo · source -
Some pedantic points:> Ruby Central, whose dependence on one big sponsor then produced the 2025 takeoverRuby Central had two major sponsors at the time: Alpha Omega and Shopify. Also the events had much more to do with interpersonal conflicts than sponsors.My report: https://rubycentral.org/news/rubygems-fracture-incident-repo...That is the GitHub…
2 more of the top 3 · 34 posts in this stretch
-
A
Nobody pays for open source. We can force them to. https:// seldo.com/posts/nobody-pays-fo r-open-source-we-can-force-them-to/
-
He confuses developer adoption with cloud infrastructure maintenance, and he fundamentally misreads what software maintainers actually want.The forking tax is great, and it requires a permissible checkpoint in the repo, which might not be available at all if you start correctly. Then the forks they use are quite literally "theirs", people don't…
-
-
background
Seldo publishes essay on FOSS economics and forced funding — A blog post titled "Nobody pays for FOSS, we can force them to" appeared on Seldo's site, arguing that open-source software operates under an unstable market equilibrium using evolutionary biology models (hawks and doves). The author describes how permissive licenses (MIT, BSD, Apache) have dominated because forking undermines attempts to charge for open source, and signals a proposed mechanism in the registry section.
Also covered reported alongside — the timeline has no entry for these yet
-
first by HN Best, 3d ago · also HN Frontpage
What people are saying 21 voices from 1 site · best of 34 · verbatim
- Sep 22
-
> If you want people to pay you for your software, stop writing it for free. Conversely, if you write it for free, don't expect people to pay you for it. Otherwise you are no better than someone at an intersection with a bottle of Windex and a squeegee who, unsolicited, cleans a windshield and then demands the driver to pay for it.There are two…
- Sep 21
-
Why would this be implemented, though?The author talks about how companies don't pay OSS maintainers because they don't have to. But they often pay registry maintainers because they do have to (or they have to run their own, which they don't want to, so they pay).But why would the registry set up a system to pay maintainers? They don't have to, so…
-
I have always wondered about most common tools. How much should maintainer of say bash be paid per install? Or per use? Or per month a system runs? What about all other core tools or common tools? Even most of things in say Linux?Surely those are much more important and more deserving than any service or whatever you run on them? You can't install…
-
Depends on what you're doing, the "source-available" model may not work. Because many software earns their money through just few tricks, maybe it's more user-friendly design, maybe it's better predictive algorithm etc. These tricks hidden deep in the logic so it's hard for the competitors to figure out in months time.But if you made the source…
-
It is not so black and white.I am annoyed by people who do bait and switch, like „we are open and promise free forever” - just after they build community or they manage to get some VC to talk with suddenly they start charging for project taking in all work contributors also created with it.On the other hand there is bunch of cool projects that…
-
This is a great proposal, but other than the gamification worry, I wonder if it also changes the contribution model?Eg. how motivated are you to contribute an important set of fixes to an upstream package knowing that this package is getting lots of money for the maintainer, and would not get any for you? Would you instead fork hoping to get…
- Sep 20
-
There is a pretty reliable way to do this. Which is to distribute the code under two licenses, where one of them is the AGPL and the other is a paid license.AGPL allows you to satisfy the free software people (and the free-as-in-beer people) and correspondingly win market share and get code contributions etc., but it also scares a lot of large…
-
> Because there are two games going on, and they have different winners. In the code game the resource is the software itself, and free wins every time, because anybody can copy code, so any attempt to charge for it invites a copy that doesn't. In the supply game the resource is not having to think about where the code comes from, and that game is…
-
Indeed. It's either AGPLv3 or all rights reserved, and I'm increasingly in the proprietary camp.There are two free software business models:1. Choosing the most copyleft, most business hostile license imaginable (AGPLv3) and charging for permission to violate it.2. Relying on crowd funded patronage via platforms like Patreon, GitHub Sponsors…
-
Glossing over that too long article, the main proposition seems to be :> The registries should charge companies, and pay maintainersThey already centralize packages, centralizing money flows is bound to cause more issues. By the way, npm is owned by GitHub, and GitHub is owned by Microsoft. "Your payment for your leftpad package has been…
-
(Speaking only for myself.)Having open indices charge money is the “easy” part, relatively speaking. The author is correct that most companies will grumble a bit and then fork over the nominal amount of money needed to preserve their existing assumptions.I think the rest of this don’t really work in practice though: it’s actually incredibly hard…
-
This is very interesting: it is a lot like the GLP (pun intended) solution: it doesn't try to "cure" the symptom, it just piggybacks onto the existing facts-on-the-ground and tries to make things better from there.I'm not totally sure I understand the "distribution/registries" thing though? This also related to GitHub and HF, right? And Netflix…
-
Why would you write such an important article with AI? I can't share this with people I know because they will lose trust if I send them AI articles. It's really, very easy to tell because it's filled with AI rhetoric and you don't sound like this in your writing from 2020 and before
-
You entirely miss the point of open source.Open source is not about your ability to charge for the software. It is about the ability of the users of your software to modify it."Open-source software has its roots in the culture of source code sharing that dates back to the origins of computing in the 1950s. The term was formalized in 1998 with the…
-
I think it's a great idea and I hope someone inside the teams of popular registries sees this and they actually give it a go. I imagine the shitstorm of reactions that it's gonna cause from people who aren't even included in the "required to pay" group and I wish the registry maintainers strength to get through this
-
The thing is; if your software wasn't offered for free, nobody would use it because someone else would offer their alternative for free.Also, the most difficult problems which software solve are hidden problems. Sometimes critical, but hidden nonetheless. Nobody cares about system failure, at all, until it happens to them.No matter how good your…
-
One of the easiest ways to get paid for something is to to offer commercial support once something shifts to 'end of life' for community support. Can't get off of an old busted version - write a check for continued support! This sort of thing is reasonably easy to get through the accounting process.Leaving a tip, paying for something free, trying…
-
>Otherwise you are no better than someone at an intersection with a bottle of Windex and a squeegee who, unsolicited, cleans a windshield and then demands the driver to pay for it.This seems like a pet-peeve that's slipped through, because1) It's really not; the FOSS developers never forced anyone to use their software, even if they're asking for…
-
> Now, finally, I have an idea. It's gonna take 5000 words to get there, though, so if you don't have that kind of time, skip to the part about registries.This article is full of LLMisms, which is to be expected but maybe it wouldn't be 5000 words and wouldn't need this disclaimer if they wrote it themselves
-
I feel like the main issue with projects switching between a permissive and less permissive license and back is that starting out as fully permissive in the first place was the main error.If everybody would just agree to start their open source code as something like source-available or OpenRAIL -requiring companies with more than $5M in annual…
-
I'm not sure it fits the free and/or libre software philosophy but I'm a big fan of releasing otherwise free and open source software as a paid version and with some exclusive QoL features in proprietary store fronts.For example Krita. https://krita.org/en/download/ FOSS but you can buy it on Steam, Microsoft Store, Epic Store, and Apple Store…