After 13 Years, Seldo's Open Source Economics Essay Lands on "Send Corporations a Huge Bill"
seldo · x · 2026-09-13
Developer seldo finally published a 5000-word essay he'd been noodling on since 2013: "Nobody pays for open source. We can force them to." Using the hawks-and-doves evolutionary stable strategy model, he argues free always wins in software, leaving maintainers unpaid — and his unexpected conclusion is that Microsoft (via GitHub/npm) should send corporations a huge bill, with package registries as the leverage point.
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