“Free beer and free speech are all very well, but a free weekend? That's something worth paying for.”
Critical software is maintained by unpaid volunteers, and that’s not OK.
Companies make millions from software they don’t pay for. Asking them to pay is not the answer. We need to try something new.
The cloud shows that people and companies will pay for convenience – even if they don’t end up owning anything.
A site that charged $15/month for binary packages could pay maintainers $0.001 per download. For the most popular open source projects, that’s over $10K per month.
Don’t want to pay? The source code is still free. Compile it yourself.
The Web Assembly Systems Interface (WASI) represents a new paradigm for publishing and distributing packages. It’s a chance to do something different.