Open source is dying — and it's not the hype

The big open-source projects are getting eaten alive. Gal Ratner lays out the math: the people who maintain these libraries don't get paid, the companies that build on top of them do — and the economics simply don't close. The result is abandonment, security holes, and the slow death of the commons.

What's really happened is that the infrastructure layer of the internet — the stuff that lets you ship code on time — got quietly privatized by companies who take from it and give nothing back. The projects that survived this wave were either bought, forked by a company, or abandoned. The open-source model that powered the last fifteen years of software development is over.

The fix Ratner proposes is straightforward: pay the maintainers. Not with stock options or PR mentions, but with real money — a salary, a retainer, something that covers their time. If you're running a side hustle or building a business on top of open source, this should hit differently. You're using these projects because they work. The people who make them work are the ones who need the money.

Why this matters for us: every app, service, and side business in this community is built on libraries nobody gets paid for — and when those projects die, our tools die with them.