GoKawiilNobody pays for open source. We can force them to.
The first time I thought it would be a good idea to write a blog post about the economics of open source was 2013, so this post has been in the works a while. The closest I got before today was 2022, when I wrote a stream-of-consciousness rant into my iOS notes that ended with basically "nothing fucking works". And then that sat there for 4 more years, because "nothing works" is too depressing to bother writing 5000 words about. Now, finally, I have an idea. It's gonna take 5000 words to get there, though, so if you don't have that kind of time, skip to the part about registries.
Open source is a game with a stable outcome, and the outcome is that free wins
I've written before about hawks and doves, which is a model from evolutionary biology. You have a population of animals competing for some resource. Some of them fight for it (hawks) and some of them share it (doves). A population that is all hawks is unstable: everybody's constantly getting hurt, and the first two doves to show up cooperate with each other and out-compete everyone. A population that is all doves is unstable too: the first hawk to show up competes with everybody and wins every time. What's stable is a mixture of both types, in proportions such that changing your behaviour doesn't help you, so nobody does. That mix is called an evolutionarily stable strategy, or ESS, and the important word is "stable." It's not the best strategy (arguably that's all doves, where nobody gets hurt), it's just the one the population ends up at and can't leave. I find it a useful way of thinking about software, because software has hawks and doves too.
Closed source is the hawk. It competes: it withholds the code, charges a premium for having something nobody else has, and fights to keep it that way. Open source is the dove. It cooperates: it gives the code away and takes the gains from everybody else giving theirs away too. The resource they're competing over is money, ultimately, though it shows up first as users and as developer attention.
The equilibrium we've landed on is very specific. The evolutionarily stable strategy for a piece of software is "anybody may use this for anything, including commercially, for free." That's MIT, BSD, Apache, the licenses that ask for nothing. Every project that has tried to be a slightly less generous dove has lost to a project that stayed a full dove, and I can give you a lot of examples:
In 2017 the Apache Software Foundation banned React's BSD+Patents license from Apache projects, WordPress announced it was dropping React, and within weeks Facebook relicensed React under MIT rather than watch it die. In 2021 Elastic moved Elasticsearch to a source-available license to stop Amazon selling it as a service. Amazon forked it as OpenSearch, the fork ended up at the Linux Foundation with thousands of contributors, and in 2024 Elastic quietly went back to an open source license. In 2023 HashiCorp did the same thing to Terraform. The OpenTofu fork went to the Linux Foundation, and HashiCorp got bought by IBM. In March 2024 Redis did it too. The Valkey fork picked up every cloud provider within about a week, and in May 2025 Redis put the AGPL back, with the CEO admitting the change had cost them enormously.
Nobody who has tried to charge for open source at the license level has held the line against a competently run fork, and I don't think that's because of ideology. The people running those companies would love to charge for their code, and most of the people forking it don't care much about freedom in the abstract. It's because of the structure of the market. Disruption, in the original sense, is when a much worse and much cheaper product takes over the bottom of the market, then gets gradually better until it's eaten the whole thing, and there's nothing to stop that process repeating until the product costs nothing at all. Software has been getting disrupted like this for as long as there has been software, and what you end up with is a market with two halves: an enormous cheap half that nearly everybody uses, and a much smaller expensive half that makes nearly all of the money. Android has the market share and iOS has the profits, and they are both gigantic successes depending on which number you're looking at. Free wins share and closed wins profit, and both of them win.
The stable outcome runs on people burning out
So far this is fine. Free software wins, closed software makes money, everybody has a niche. The problem is what the free layer looks like from the inside.
... continue reading