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A comment on GitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month. Parent comment

Re:GitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month by dgacmu on Wednesday January 14, 2026 @01:03PM (#46619675)
I agree with you, but I do think we have a bit of a problem in which an open source creator makes something and then suddenly finds themselves accidentally having created a load-bearing component that is not only used by a lot of people and companies, but where people are demanding that bugs be fixed, etc., and we lack great models for helping transition it from "I do this for fun, might fix the bug if I ever feel like it" to " I respect that this has become a critical dependency and we will find a way to make it someone's job to make it more like a product".

I gather that the open source maintainers who have found themselves in this situation sometimes get very unhappy about it, and I can see why -- it's not like they woke up one day and suddenly had a critical component on their hands, it kind of evolved over time and after a while they're like "uhoh, I don't think this is what I signed up for"

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Re:GitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month by ummonk on Wednesday January 14, 2026 @02:40PM (#46621693)
I think expecting to get paid to fix bugs, add features, etc. to one’s open source code is much more reasonable and there should be marketplace infrastructure that makes this much easier to do (compared to the current system where developers have to apply for corporate grants for long running projects).
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Re:GitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month by kiba on Wednesday January 14, 2026 @04:36PM (#46623913)
Public funding from governments would make sense. Open source software are effectively public good.
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Re:GitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month by mjrpes on Wednesday January 14, 2026 @06:39PM (#46625662)
Europe is doing this: https://eu-stf.openforumeurope.org/
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Re:GitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month by chrysoprace on Wednesday January 14, 2026 @08:06PM (#46626545)
In that case the maintainer needs to have some self-restraint and accept that they don't owe them anything. If somebody depends on the maintainer's package for a critical component then they should consider paying them and possibly drawing up an explicit contract. That's what we did at my work for a critical open source component, where we paid the maintainer to add several features we needed.
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Re:GitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month by zephen on Wednesday January 14, 2026 @10:05PM (#46627534)
It's commendable that your organization did this.

But...

> the maintainer needs to have some self-restraint and accept that they don't owe them anything.

Assumes (especially in cases where "maintainer == original author" psychological capabilities that simply might not exist in the maintainer.

I don't know of a good way to deal with this, other than to be kind and try to notice potential signs of impeding burn-out before an implosion.

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Re:GitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month by jrmg on Wednesday January 14, 2026 @09:04PM (#46627029)
I don’t think the added idea of “I pay good money for my GitHub subscription and some of that pays you, you are obligated to support me!” would help here.
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Re:GitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month by dgacmu on Thursday January 15, 2026 @11:12AM (#46634704)
I agree - but maybe if there were easy ways to opt-in to "hey I want to actually get paid for this thing and in return I'm going to spend more time on it" it might be a good thing. I'm not sure the model in this post is the right way -- I like what Filippo Valsorda has done in creating a small company of developers who do contracted OSS crypto software maintenance. But complicated.
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