This article was originally published in issue 86 of The Crux.

It will come as no surprise to regular readers that I am very interested in how open source developers and maintainers get paid. Mostly, they don't.

Right now, most developers aren't paid directly to work on open source. The work happens indirectly. Most contributors are people volunteering their time as they get paid for doing other things. This collective effort, variously organised, has somehow embedded open source software into the critical systems that enable our modern world to function. Yet keeping it all alive and running remains an unanswered question.

A subset of people are paid to work on open source, some as part of their job, others as the entirety of their job. For some projects, the majority of contributions (though rarely the totality) are made by a core group of people employed by a sponsoring company. For other projects, such as Kubernetes, a loose coalition of companies share the costs by contributing to an ecosystem they all benefit from. The German government has recently experimented with paying developers to work on open source software, via its Sovereign Tech Fund.

Yet when I asked a panel at KubeCon EU about government funding of open source, there was significant discomfort and reluctance. The panellists all appeared to view government involvement in technology as something to be avoided, not encouraged. Someone floated the idea of companies paying into a shared fund that could be distributed to pay developers to work on open source. The conversation stepped carefully around a central theme, reflexively avoiding actually saying the word ‘tax’ aloud.

It was quite the spectacle.

To get around this somewhat childish aversion to the word tax, I propose we rebrand the idea to something more palatable: OpenFunding. Let us democratize the funding of our communities! You've heard of Infrastructure as Code, here comes Funding for Code! Embrace DevSecFunOps!

It can't be any less silly than the verbal contortions people are currently employing as they lament how unfair it is that big corporations are hoarding all the money. What if, instead of waiting for them to give back we collectively made them pay their fair share? What if democratization involved actual democracy for a change?

It's hardly a new idea, so why do I feel like a heretic for writing this?