Open source is not free: somebody pays, and the people who get the value have no easy way to

Somebody is paying for open source, even if only with their time. The long tail is measurable and not small: 6.99% of Homebrew's macOS install events in the last 30 days, and 16.66% over a year, came from versions older than the newest three, and 18.55% of pip downloads run on end-of-life Python. Money flows to old versions when a vendor owns them (Oracle earned $19.8 billion from support last year; Red Hat's subscriptions ran at about 93% gross margin) and not when a community does: open source receives about 0.09% of its estimated value in investment, and 60% of maintainers describe themselves as unpaid hobbyists. The question was never whether somebody pays; it is whether the people who get the value have an easy way to pay for it.

Decided by. Nobody yet: a candidate for Dinis to read, comment on and decide (keep, rewrite, merge, cut, article first, later, not doing it).

Note. The case that started it: an Intel iMac clean-installed with macOS 13 for Dinis's agents could not run Homebrew or Docker Desktop and needed Python by hand; the research corrected the story (only the 2017 iMacs stop at Ventura; Homebrew now refuses the CPU, not just the OS). The xz maintainer wrote 'this is an unpaid hobby project' two years before the backdoor.

Where it comes from

Open source is not free In short; The long tail, measured; Where the money flows (newsroom)

What it answers in the 2018 book

Open Source answered written, MVP for Gen Z Dev
3rd-party-modules answered outline, Security

Where it goes

Chapter Open source, part Build it without a server (drafting); topic Open source: contribute, fork, and why it protects everyone.

Other ideas proposed for the same chapter: Open source means nobody can lock you in: the fork next door, Your first pull request: open source is still the newcomer's best door, Open source, community and OWASP: working and getting hired in the open, with the names behind it, Open source is why it is easy to throw your own technology away, Open source as a constraint: all of it, or it is an evaluation version with a better name, Open source everything, and sell the customised, tested, maintained build.

Node idea:open-source-is-not-free in graph.json; see it in the graph. Source: admin/content/graph/ideas.json.