A few weeks ago, I wrote about open-source projects moving toward paid or dual-licensing models, and whether AI is accelerating that shift.
Now Polly, one of the most popular .NET resilience libraries, is taking a slightly different approach.
Polly is introducing an Open Source Maintenance Fee (OSMF). The source license stays the same and Polly remains open source, but companies earning at least $20,000 from a product or project using Polly will be required to pay $20/month per organization for its maintained releases.
It's an interesting approach to the open-source sustainability problem. You can read the Polly announcement.
OSMF itself is actually an interesting model for open-source maintainers. Instead of changing the open-source license or putting the source code behind a commercial license, maintainers can charge a small maintenance fee for organizations using their maintained releases in revenue-generating products.
GitHub Sponsors can be used to collect the fee, with projects able to define their own pricing or tiers. The source code itself still remains available under its open-source license.
You can read more on the OSMF page.
In Polly's case, $20 per month - $240 per year, is a pretty small amount for a company generating at least $20,000 from a product using it. The administrative side might actually be more annoying for some companies than the price itself. We all know how it works in corporate when it comes to project license purchases, right? 😄
I find this especially interesting because it's another possible answer to the problem I wrote about earlier: how do you fund long-term open-source maintenance without simply turning the project into a commercial product?
What do you think about OSMF? Or do you know another interesting approach to making open-source projects sustainable in the AI era?
