Introducing the Maintenance Fee Initiative: A New Model for Funding Open Source Project Maintainers

Developer Rob Menching (creator of the WiX project for creating installation packages for Windows) has introduced the Maintenance Fee initiative aimed at addressing financing issues for maintainers of open-source projects.

Menching’s concept for the Maintenance Fee involves charging a nominal monthly fee (suggested as a $10 donation) to ensure proper financial stability for open-source projects, while keeping them accessible and avoiding funding models like Open Core, which entail providing paid versions with additional features.

According to OpenNET, the Maintenance Fee initiative proposes monthly payments from users and businesses that benefit commercially, either directly or indirectly, from the use of open-source projects. This payment encouragement is achieved by incorporating a End User License Agreement (EULA) for maintainers, which governs access to infrastructure, binary builds, and ready-made packages. It is suggested that payments be processed through the GitHub Sponsorship system.

Per the EULA, only paying subscribers and non-commercial users can download binary release builds, engage in discussions, and submit issue reports. Access to the source code remains unchanged and is provided in accordance with the open licenses applicable to the projects. If a company benefiting from a project chooses not to pay the monthly fee, it can utilize the code from the repository to create its own builds but is prohibited from using the official release builds provided by the main project. For instance, in such cases, the use of official package builds as dependencies in package managers like NPM and NuGet is forbidden.

The initiative’s author points out that maintainers often put in substantial efforts without receiving compensation, and many companies view them as free labor. This perspective leads to burnout and disinterest in ongoing projects. Profiting from open-source code maintained by others without giving anything in return is seen as exploitative. Dedicating a small portion of income to maintainers is viewed as a fair and mutually beneficial solution, allowing companies to directly fund the maintainers of the projects their products depend on.

The Maintenance Fee is anticipated to enhance the sustainability of open-source solutions and allow for greater focus on addressing bug reports, answering user inquiries, maintaining build infrastructure, updating dependencies, monitoring vulnerabilities, and performing routine tasks like moderating discussions and renewing certificates for digital signatures.