The Real Cost of Free Code: Why Open Source Needs to Charge Corporate Users

Despite companies profiting billions from open source code, 60% of maintainers are unpaid and only 26% earn more than $1,000 annually, revealing a fundamentally broken funding model. Package registries handling trillions of downloads operate on minimal budgets while absorbing traffic primarily from commercial cloud providers, yet these companies donate pittance relative to their market caps. The author argues open source must transition from charity to commercial licensing, requiring corporate users to pay for access to ensure both developer compensation and infrastructure sustainability.