Paying for open source is not a precondition of its sustainability; large projects can thrive while rejecting market-based terms entirely.

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• A business making hundreds of millions from an open source project owes it money or contribution, and can be refused its trademarks if it gives neither. MMMatt Mullenweg26 Sept 2024open source
• A company that will not accept a project’s terms is free to go and use a more permissive project instead. MMMatt Mullenweg26 Sept 2024open source
• A few hundred dollars a month is nothing to a company and transformative to a project, so engineers should be the ones asking their employers to pay it. DDDrew DeVault22 Aug 2018open source
• A licence is only the floor of open source; what keeps a project alive is an ethos of contribution that no licence can compel. MMMatt Mullenweg17 Sept 2024open source
• A proprietary language licensed from Microsoft had zero chance in the JavaScript ecosystem: TypeScript had to be open source or nobody would come. AHAnders Hejlsberg13 May 2026open source

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