Agreed, and furthermore, I would imagine since some projects (thinking ghostty, linux, and others) are non-profits there are tax incentives for donating and supporting. Software stacks are still neglected, and that points to inefficiencies (companies and corps not valuing open source) and willful malice (hiding them in the "proprietary chain"), and just general abuse of the commons (take and don't pay).

AI has made the "hard" things more important. Everyone can now build an e-commerce website or demo, but the utilities, OSes, and browsers now serve as the base of those projects. They are beginning to be overwhelmed, whether it be through AI bug reports, exponential load on some platforms, or other indirect factors, and there isn't much relief in sight.

We need a large re-alignment of Math, Software and Sciences. I'm not elucidating anything new here, simply musing. Science and math workers can be focused on replication and application, and software expertise focuses on the "foundational" systems.

> It's indeed ridiculous how the world's trillion dollar private companies run on essential software that idealistic open-source maintainers build basically for free while scrambling to even make basic income.

The most ridiculous thing is that idealistic open-source maintainers are still doing it, while this is being an established status quo for at least 30 years. Or maybe they have their incentive, and, while I don't find it palatable too, large corporations understands that. What's _your_ incentive in having such strong opinions about that ?

True. It's really cases like this that demonstrate the shortcomings of BSD/MIT licenses -- at least if you are of the position, that companies could and should contribute a sliver of profits back to the projects enabling that success.

(Much like contributing back in taxes for the infrastructure used and the educational system producing the qualified employees. But that may be a bridge too far for some of HNs readership :) )

Maybe some countries could pay stipend to software developers who do that? I mean, this open source software enables other companies to produce cheaper software and to earn more money and they pay taxes from that money, so tiny bit of these taxes could also be redistributed back to some independent developers.

> idealistic open-source maintainers build basically for free while scrambling to even make basic income.

Maybe these maintainers could simply cease doing all this free work? There are other ways to make a living. Perhaps even doing the same thing but with better negotiation skills. No one is forcing anyone to do this. The reality is that if 100% of the tzdb and SQLite teams disappeared today, Microsoft and Google would have these projects back under stable operation before the weekend.

We cannot expect a realistic economy to arbitrarily compensate people who originally did not seek compensation without a lot of really bad side effects. Does anyone on HN have any actual evidence that the maintainers of truly load bearing infrastructure (billions of devices+) are genuinely struggling economically?

I only make MIT because, after a decade of GPL, I actually find lawyers and license bullshit more annoying. Just let me build stuff.

>e.g. business of > million revenue must pay for usage in their product

That happens with linux, if businesses don't want their supply chain to vanish.

But, hey, we are trying communism :)

I mean, it is called "Free software", it has been made purely for free.

Now AI has made software abundant, there really isn't any need to pay maintainers really.

Enterprises can just fork it, rebuild the software for their own needs and not contribute anything back.

Even if the license is AGPL, they ignore it anyway and it is unenforceable.

Out of curiosity I asked Codex to build a version of this article that can be read/scrolled in a normal way while preserving the original graphics/text. Codex built it in about 10min with GPT-6.1 Sol High (consumed 8% of my 5h quota). It even thought of adding a dark/light mode switcher which is useful too. It still needs a few prompts of minor polishing, but already more readable to me.

If you use Reader View in your browser, its much easier to read.

On desktop it is very difficult to read.

I'm absolutely sure I don't like it, and I'm reading it on desktop.

Only made it a couple of "pages" in and had to close the tab entirely because of the convoluted animated presentation.

None of it felt like it was in service of anything other than screaming "look how neat this is!" which is just terribly distracting.

Good content, but the scroll-linked animations are the cancer of modern web.

Believe it or nit, the answer to this is -- more communism.

Sorry to be harsh but, dev gets hit by bus, project is forked, people move on.

I'm sympathetic to this topic but I hate the framing. "The people holding up the internet" includes thousands of people at Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and yes, some volunteers too who are doing as a hobby.

They are free to give it up and stop doing it. Some person or company will pick it up.

The devs should send emails asking for a couple million each to all the large tech companies while reminding them how much their utility is being used for their product. I think a lot of them will donate the money. It’s lesser than chump change to them.

The difference is that the employees at tier 1 backbone providers get paid, and if one of them quits, there is an organization responsible (and incentivized) to hire and train replacements.