I agree that open source infrastructure needs to be funded. I think first there needs to be a mindset shift in who's responsible for open source.

Currently when new vulnerabilities pop up (i.e. xz-utils compromise, log4j shell), people are quick to blame the maintainers for it. Why shouldn't companies instead be responsible for these vulnerabilities?

Currently, companies treat open source code as someone else's, so they don't bother to audit, maintain it, or fund it. Clearly, this is wrong, and reflected in the oss license, which states that code is solely consumer's responsibility.

It's hard to count but my guess is that in France, the French government is the main creator of open-source software in France.

Contribution to existing projects lacks behind, but it's getting better.

Quite often the public infrastructure (at least in some EU countries) is funded in the way so that the investors give the funds and then a small fee is collected and used to pay for the loan and maintenance. Sometimes after the loan is fully paid the infra usage fees are waived.

This is something like commercial open source

The money of running Linux in government is probably already flowing to the US, in the pockets of Redhat and IBM.

The public barely want to fund public infrastructure, for the electricity they use, the water they drink. And especially not for the electricity and water that their neighbours, or people across town, or people somewhere else in the country need.

I would be much more excited in finding ways to fund public infrastructure like Amazon does Prime rather than going the other way around. If anything, academic open source which is the closest alternative has not really produced much and the production open source that actually works is by and large corporate-sponsored.

P.S. The article also opens by contrasting open source consumption and contribution. In a certain sense, as the article acknowledges later, I care much much more about government consuming free software, as a neutral platform to avoid lock-in for themselves and the taxpayer, as well as providing an open foundation for integration and letting people use free software if they choose to (and not lock them to iOS and Android, for instance.) That alone is one of the biggest ways they can contribute. The actual code contribution will come naturally if they do that.

Good article. Could come across a bit like an unintentional bait and switch from the other point of view though, these projects love to see adoption but then require funding to maintain? Maybe setting the project up more commercially that then self funds the open source platform like Laravel is a more sustainable model?

Just in case people don't realize, the author is Dries Buytaert who created drupal.

Perhaps make open source work tax deductible, just like charity donations?

yes, yes, everybody know that now...

but software is just not-a-base thing - it needs cpu's, computers. If you want realy independence do base thing - computer hardware ! Make small hardware that just can run Linux, can display things and use keyboard and mouse... Do eg. Dennmark do this ? Or Bosh ? Or...

Computers just to connect to internet and send some messages via IRC or something... ;)

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One yet another narrative that claim all people owe to an open source.

I believe, once in deep future, an open source developers will grown and stop repeating this sectarian mantra.

No one owes you anything. If you do opensource and you need in money - use your open source as marketing tool to promote services you sell.

It's simple as 2+2, I've mention it in my blog post https://vitonsky.net/blog/2025/06/24/open-source/

I think those who believe a companies will pay to you for a random OSS is just a kids. Ask people who can use a sheets, they explain you why your product will die with this approach.