Comment by firesteelrain

I agree that $10,000 isn’t a meaningful investment given the scale of reliance.

What would a fair model look like? An open-source infrastructure endowment? Ongoing support contracts per critical library?

At the same time, I think there’s a tension in open source we don’t talk about enough: it’s built to be free and open to all, including the corporations we might wish were more generous. No one signed a contract!

As the article states, Libxml2 was widely promoted (and adopted) as the go-to XML parser. Now, the maintainer is understandably tired. There is now a sustainability problem that is more systemic than personal. How much did the creator of libxml benefit?

I don’t think we should expect companies to do the right thing just because they benefit and it isn’t how open source was meant to be and this isn’t how open source is supposed to work

But maybe that’s the real problem