Author of WiX, an open source toolkit for creating installation packages for Windows, is developing the Maintenance Fee initiative to address the funding problem for open source project maintainers. The Maintenance Fee initiative, through a small monthly fee (an option of $10), ensures the financial sustainability of projects without limiting their openness or resorting to funding models like Open Core, which require the delivery of an extended paid version.
The essence of Maintenance Fee is to conduct a monthly payment for users and companies that receive commercial benefits and directly or indirectly earn money from using an open source project. Payment is stimulated by adding a user agreement (EULA) to maintainers, regulating access to the infrastructure, binary assemblies and ready-made packages. It is proposed to use the GitHub Sponsorship system to transfer the fee.
According to the EULA, only paid subscribers and users who do not profit from the project can download binary release builds, participate in discussions, and submit issue requests. Access to the source code remains unchanged and is provided in accordance with the open licenses used by the projects. If a company that profits from the project does not want to pay a monthly fee, it can use the code from the repository and independently create builds for itself, but does not have the right to use ready-made release builds provided by the main project (among other things, it is prohibited to use official package builds among dependencies connected through package managers such as NPM and NuGet).
It is noted that maintainers do a lot of work, but often receive nothing in return and are considered by many companies as free labor. Such an attitude leads to burnout and loss of interest in the projects being developed. Making money on open source maintained by others without giving anything back is perceived as parasitism. Transferring a small share of the income to maintainers is seen as a fair and mutually beneficial solution, in which companies directly finance maintainers of projects on which their products depend.
It is expected that maintenance fees will increase the sustainability of open source projects and allow more time to focus on sorting out bug reports, answering user questions, maintaining build infrastructure, updating dependencies, tracking vulnerabilities, and performing routine tasks such as moderating discussions and updating digital signature certificates.
Source: opennet.ru
