written on Monday, October 14, 2024

This year, one of the projects I was involved in at Sentry was the launch of The Open Source Pledge. The idea behind it is simple: companies pledge an amount proportional to the number of developers they employ to fund the Open Source projects they depend on. I have written about this before.

Since then, I've had the chance to engage in many insightful discussions about Open Source funding and licensing. In the meantime we have officially launched the pledge, and almost simultaneously WordPress entered a crisis. At the heart of that crisis is a clash between Open Source ideals and financial interests by people other than the original creators.

You might have a lot of opinions on David Heinemeier Hansson, but I encourage you to read two of his recent posts on that very topic. In Automattic is doing open source dirty David is laying out the case that Automattic has no right to impose moral obligations on beyond the scope of the license. This has been followed by Open source royalty and mad kings in which he goes deeper into the fallout that Matt Mullenweg (the creator of WordPress) is causing with his fight.

I'm largely in agreement with the posts. However I want to talk a bit about some pretty significant difference between David's opinions on Open Source funding (on which these posts appear to be based): the money element. In 2013 David wrote the following about money and Open Source:

[…] it's tempting to cash in on goodwill earned. […] It's a cliché, but once you've sold out, the goodwill might well be spent for good.

[…] part of the reason much of open source is so good, and often so superior to closed-source commercial projects, is the natural boundary of constraints. If you are not being paid or otherwise compensated directly for your work, you're less likely to needlessly embellish it. […]

—David Heinemeier Hansson, The perils of mixing open source and money

At face value, this suggests that Open Source and money shouldn’t mix, and that the absence of monetary rewards fosters a unique creative process. There's certainly truth to this, but in reality, Open Source and money often mix quickly.

If you look under the cover of many successful Open Source projects you will find companies with their own commercial interests supporting them (eg: Linux via contributors), companies outright leading projects they are also commercializing (eg: MariaDB, redis) or companies funding Open Source projects primarily for marketing / up-sell purposes (uv, next.js, pydantic, …). Even when money doesn't directly fund an Open Source project, others may still profit from it, yet often those are not the original creators. These dynamics create stresses and moral dilemmas.

I’ve said this before, but it’s no coincidence that Rails has a foundation, large conferences, a strong core team, and a trademark, while Flask has none of it. There are barriers and it takes a lot of energy and determination to push a project to a level where it can sustain itself.

Rails pushed through this barrier. I never did with any of my projects and I'm at peace with that. I got to learn a lot through my Open Source work, I achieved a certain level of notoriety that I benefit from. I built a meaningful career by leveraging my work and I even met my wonderful wife that way. All are consequences of my Open Source contributions. There were clear and indisputable benefits to it and by all accounts I'm a happy and grateful person.

But every now and then doubts creep in and I wonder if I should have done something more commercial with Flask, or if I should have pushed Rye further. As much as I love listening to Charlie talking about uv, there is also an unavoidable doubt lingering there what could have been if I dared to build out Rye with funding on my own.

Over the years, I have seen too many of my colleagues and acquaintances struggle one way or another. Psychological, mentally and professionally. Midlife crises, burnout, health, and dealing with a strong feeling of dread and disappointment. Many of this as a indirect or even direct result of their Open Source work. While projects like Rails and Laravel are great examples of successful open source stewardship, they are also outliers. Many others don't survive or grow to that level.

And yet even some of those lighthouse projects can become fallen stars and face challenges. WordPress by all accounts is a massive success. WordPress is in the top 1% of open source projects in terms of impact, success, and financial return for its creator. Yet despite that — and it finding an actual business model to commercialize it — its creator suffers from the same fate as many small Open Source libraries: a feeling of being wronged.

This is where the lines between law and morality blur. Matt feels mistreated, especially by a private equity firm, but neither trademarks nor license terms can resolve the issue for him. It’s a moral question, and sadly, Matt’s actions have alienated many who would otherwise support him. He's turning into a “mad king” and behaving immoral in his own ways.

The reality is that we humans are messy and unpredictable. We don't quite know how we will behave until we have been throw into a particular situation. Open Source walks a very fine line, and anyone claiming to have all the answers probably doesn't. I certainly don't.

Is it a wise to mix Open Source and money? Maybe not. Yet I also believe it's something that is just a reality we need to navigate. Today there are some projects too small to get any funding (xz) and there are projects large enough to find some way to sustain by funneling money to it (Rails, WordPress).

We target with the Pledge small projects in particular. It's our suggestion of how to give to projects for which the barrier to attract funding is too high. At the same time I recognize all the open questions it leaves. There are questions about tax treatments, there are questions about sustainabilty and incentives, questions about distribution and governance.

I firmly believe that the current state of Open Source and money is inadequate, and we should strive for a better one. Will the Pledge help? I hope for some projects, but WordPress has shown that we need to drive forward that conversation of money and Open Source regardless of thes size of the project.