GitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month to fund open source

Source: Hacker News

Listen to me.

It is crazy, absolutely crazy to depend on open source to be free (as beer). It is not okay to consider that this labor fell from the sky and is a gift, and that the people behind it are just doing it for their own enjoyment.

It is impossible to imagine that what we’re doing today is the only way—begging for donations, hoping to get noticed, hoping for a lifeline.

The Problem

• Open‑source maintainers receive little or no compensation for critical infrastructure that powers countless services.
• Current funding models (donations, sponsorships) are unreliable and often insufficient.
• The distribution of revenue from platforms like Spotify shows how difficult it is to allocate money fairly among creators.

A Proposed Solution

GitHub could charge every organization $1 more per user per month and direct those funds into an Open Source Fund held in escrow. The fund would be distributed based on usage:

• Every mention of a package in a package.json or requirements.txt would earn a share of the pie.
• Dockerfile FROM statements could also be counted, allowing container images to contribute to the distribution.

How It Might Work

1. Opt‑out model – Organizations are automatically enrolled but can opt out if they choose.
2. Visibility badge – Enrolled organizations receive a badge (or the ability to set a custom profile background CSS, see an example here).
3. Usage tracking – GitHub parses dependency files (e.g., package.json, requirements.txt) and Dockerfiles to attribute usage to the corresponding open‑source projects.
4. Fund distribution – Collected fees are allocated proportionally to projects based on the frequency of their appearance in these files.

Open Questions

• How to handle projects that don’t appear directly in dependency files (e.g., Linux, which may not be listed in a requirements.txt)?
• What safeguards are needed to prevent gaming the system?
• How to ensure the escrow fund is transparent and accountable?

Conclusion

The current “free as beer” model for open source is unsustainable. A modest, universal fee collected by GitHub and redistributed based on actual usage could provide a more reliable revenue stream for maintainers, while keeping the software free for end users. This idea is intentionally rough around the edges—feel free to poke holes, suggest improvements, or argue against it. The goal is simply to spark a conversation about better ways to fund the open‑source ecosystem.