Nobody Pays for Open Source. We Can Force Them To.
Seldo.com, Sunday, September 13th, 2026
Registry operators should charge companies for open source and distribute royalties to maintainers automatically.
The author argues that open source has reached a stable equilibrium where free code wins market share but maintainers burn out unpaid.
While companies already spend billions on supply chain infrastructure around open source, that money bypasses the developers who create it.
The proposal: registries meter corporate usage and distribute a fixed revenue percentage to packages based on their presence in paying customers' dependency trees, automatically and without application.
This approach differs from past failed initiatives by operating at the chokepoint of supply rather than relying on voluntary charity or licensing restrictions.