Open source isn't a tip jar – it's time to charge for access
Summary
Open source funding can't be sustained by charity alone; major tech companies have donated only a tiny fraction of their wealth, while many maintainers go unpaid or burn out. The piece argues that dependency-heavy software ecosystems rely on open registries with trillions of downloads and that heavy usage by big cloud providers strains funding, raising maintenance and security concerns. It advocates creating a sustainable funding path and organizations to channel payments to maintainers, noting efforts like HeroDevs and Sentry and warning that paying for access may become the norm for commercial use.