Open source is “free”…until it isn’t. ><
The WiX Toolset introduced an “Open Source Maintenance Fee” (OSMF) earlier this year. The idea: if your company generates revenue using WiX and wants access to official releases, GitHub issues, and other project conveniences, you need to pay [1]. The source remains fully open. You can build it yourself. But polished releases and direct project engagement now come with a price.
We’ve all seen this happen and many may feel outrage. Sometimes that outrage is deserved, but I believe that’s rarely the case.
Conceptually, we need solutions like this. Small, medium, and massive organizations have built billion-dollar capabilities on the shoulders of open source code and maintainers, and most of that value never flows back to the people doing the maintenance. What often flows back are hostile, unreasonable, and entitled demands from developers and/or companies.
Some maintainers are fine with the status quo. You don’t have to release your project open source and there are many flexible licenses in the middle. Others aren’t. They’re overwhelmed. Harassed. Burned out. We’ve seen it lead to depression. In some cases, we’ve lost amazing people.
Making changes like this triggers backlash. You can see it in the GitHub thread [2] and the Hacker News discussion [3]. But the underlying point remains: if we want open source to be sustainable, we need to support the humans behind it.
Execution is hard. No model is perfect. But the OSMF model is an important iteration on this critical issue.
What would this mean for your organization? What would it mean for the maintainers you depend on? Share your thoughts. We need better answers than we have today.
Ack to Chris Hughes for posting this. [4]
Image credit: https://xkcd.com/2347/
#OpenSource #cybersecurity #mentalhealth
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[1] https://robmensching.com/blog/posts/2025/02/26/introducing-the-open-source-maintenance-fee/
[2] https://github.com/wixtoolset/issues/discussions/7212