OSI Approved Licenses™ have created a system where independent developers essentially become permanent unpaid labor for large corporations.

When developers choose an OSI Approved License™, they're not just sharing their code - they're signing up for an implicit lifetime contract of maintenance and support. The catch? It's completely one-sided. While major corporations can freely use and profit from this software, developers have effectively signed away their rights to ever be compensated for their work.

Only a tiny fraction of open source projects ever achieve financial sustainability. Sure, we all know about success stories like the Linux Kernel, but these are extreme outliers. For every PostgreSQL, there are thousands of widely-used but unfunded projects maintained by exhausted developers in their "spare time."

Here's the irony: The same big businesses that pay millions for Microsoft licenses each year get free support and free maintenance from independent developers, because OSI Approved Licenses™ licenses are really all about forfeiting your ownership over your software, and ensuring that anyone can USE your software for free.

Instead of these developers being unleashed to continually improve already world leading software, they get day jobs that completely under utilize them, or worse, direct their skills towards the enshitification of the internet or even of the wider world.

This isn't just about money - it's about sustainability. When developers can't make a living from their work:

The "OSI Approved Licenses™" model is broken. Financially, it's a multi-level marketing scheme. It's DISGUSTING to have some of the most skilled developers in the world volunteering to work for free on behalf of companies with too much money.  And most large corporations that don't primary produce software have no objection to paying for the software they depend on. 

A Path Forward

What we need is a new category of licenses that:

The current system isn't working for most developers. It's time to challenge the notion that all software must be free for everyone - including billion-dollar corporations - or else it's not really "open".

The next time someone tells you that OSI Approved Licenses™ are the only "proper" way to release software, remember: they're essentially asking developers to sign up for indefinite unpaid labor. It's time for a change.