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The original was posted on /r/opensource by /u/OkLocal2565 on 2025-09-17 09:45:12+00:00.
In the past two years a number of “open source” companies have quietly shifted from permissive licences to “non-compete” or pay-walled models. MariaDB introduced the Business Source Licence (BSL) in 2016; MongoDB, Confluent and Redis Labs followed; and HashiCorp switched Terraform to a non-compete licence. The justification is almost always the same: as these companies grow, the financial upside of being fully open diminishes, so they try to cut off “freeloaders” and capture more value. But the backlash is real: users and competitors fork projects and publish manifestos warning that licence switches create legal risk.
Red Hat’s decision to remove public access to RHEL source code has hit a similar nerve. SUSE’s Dr. Thomas Di Giacomo notes that RHEL exists only because of upstream projects like the Linux kernel, and Red Hat’s move has caused “significant concern within the open source community.” He argues that the freedom to access, modify and distribute software should remain open to all.
At the same time, many maintainers who make the code that powers our systems aren’t being paid. A 2024 Tidelift report found that 60 % of maintainers remain unpaid. The same report called this a “tragedy of the commons”: companies use free software without contributing code or funding. Burnout is inevitable; one developer with nearly three-quarters of a million downloads says he receives “no money at all.” Advocacy groups now propose that companies pay maintainers directly, for example; the OSS Pledge suggests $2 000 per developer per year.
So where’s the ethical line? At what point does gating features or switching licences move from sustainable funding to a betrayal of open-source values? Should we accept freemium models as a way to pay maintainers, or do they undermine the freedom that made Linux and FOSS so powerful? Curious how others here see it.