Nobody pays for FOSS, we can force them to
Thirty years of voluntary funding schemes haven't paid open source maintainers because asking doesn't scale. The real money already flows — to JFrog, Docker, Sonatype — at the registry layer. The fix: registries charge companies for supply (they already do), then route a slice automatically to the maintainers who make that supply worth having.
Summary
Open source maintainers struggle with funding despite the industry’s reliance on their work. A proposed solution suggests that charging companies at the registry level could ensure that a portion of those funds is directed back to the developers who contribute to these essential tools.
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