The author of WiX, an open toolkit for creating installation packages for Windows, is developing the Maintenance Fee initiative to address the funding issue associated with open projects. The Maintenance Fee initiative allows for the collection of a small monthly fee (suggested at $10) to ensure the financial sustainability of projects without limiting their openness or resorting to funding models like Open Core, which imply the provision of a paid extended version.
The essence of the Maintenance Fee is the introduction of a monthly payment for users and companies that gain commercial benefits and directly or indirectly profit from the use of the open project. Payment encouragement is implemented through the addition of the accompanying End User License Agreement (EULA) that regulates access to infrastructure, binary builds, and ready-made packages. The proposed payment method is through the GitHub Sponsorship system.
According to the EULA, only paying subscribers and users who do not derive commercial benefit from the project can download binary builds of releases, participate in discussions, and submit issue reports. Access to the source code remains unchanged and is provided in accordance with the project's applicable open licenses. If a company benefiting from the project does not wish to pay the monthly fee, it may use the code from the repository and create its own builds, but it is not allowed to use the official release builds provided by the main project (including prohibitions on using official package builds as dependencies through package managers such as NPM and NuGet).
It is noted that maintainers do a lot of work, but often receive little in return and are regarded by many companies as free labor. Such an attitude leads to burnout and loss of interest in the projects being developed. Earning money from open source maintained by others without giving anything back is seen as parasitism. Allocating a small percentage of the revenue to maintainers is considered a fair and mutually beneficial solution, where companies directly finance the maintainers of projects upon which their products depend.
It is assumed that a fee for maintenance will increase the sustainability of open projects and allow for more attention to be paid to addressing bug reports, answering user questions, maintaining build infrastructure, updating dependencies, tracking vulnerabilities, and performing routine tasks such as moderating discussions and updating certificates for digital signatures.
Source: opennet.ru
