Listen to me.

there should be a thing that reads your package.json and charges you $5/month per dependency - you don’t /have/ to! you could set the price to $1 per employee! - and then holds the funds and sends it to the people who made the code you use to do business how is not doing this more sustainable

— Greg Technology ❪⎷❫ (@greg.technology) January 13, 2026 at 9:13 PM

It is crazy, absolutely crazy to depend on open source to be free (as beer). It is not okay - it is not okay to consider that this labor fell from the sky and is a gift, and that the people/person behind are just doing it for their own enjoyments.

It is impossible to imagine that what we’re doing today is the only way. Begging/busking for donations, hoping to get noticed. Hoping for a lifeline.

Hence, a solution. Or an idea, really. Incredibly half-baked. Poke all the holes you want. It’s very unwrought and muy unripe.

GitHub should charge every org $1 more per user per month and direct it into an Open Source fund, held in escrow.

Those funds would then be distributed by usage - every mention in a package.json or requirements.txt gets you a piece of the pie.

You know how the money you pay to Spotify is very very very approximately (and not really fairly) distributed among artists that you listened to? Yes, Spotify is a very flawed model and artists are not doing well. But it is a model??

That’s it. That’s the idea. Call it the “Open Source Fund” thing, make it opt-out. Give every org a magical badge - or the ability to set their profile’s background css.

Or don’t! Let’s not do anything! People’s code and efforts - fueling incredibly critical bits of infrastructure all around the world - should just be up for grabs. Haha! Suckers!

Alright, I don’t know how you fund Linux (does Linux appear in a requirements file). Hmm. Maybe FROM commands from Dockerfiles are also read & applied. Maybe we at least start somewhere?

Anyway, you all smarter than me people can figure it out. I just cannot accept that what we have is “GOOD”. xx