Nobody pays for FOSS, we can force them to
seldo.comprojectsarchivetopicsaboutNobody pays for open source. We can force them to.September 13, 2026·23 min readThe first time I thought it would be a good idea to write a blog post about the economics of open source was 2013, so this post has been in the works a while. The closest I got before today was 2022, when I wrote a stream-of-consciousness rant into my iOS notes that ended with basically "nothing fucking works".
- ▪seldo.comprojectsarchivetopicsaboutNobody pays for open source.
- ▪We can force them to.September 13, 2026·23 min readThe first time I thought it would be a good idea to write a blog post about the economics of open source was 2013, so this post has been in the works a while.
- ▪The closest I got before today was 2022, when I wrote a stream-of-consciousness rant into my iOS notes that ended with basically "nothing fucking works".
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Seldo |
| Canonical URL | https://seldo.com/posts/nobody-pays-for-open-source-we-can-force-them-to/ |
| Publication time | Sun, 20 Sep 2026 21:04:32 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-20T21:33:47.448Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-20T21:33:47.448Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | ii8B8d6qanxP · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
seldo.comprojectsarchivetopicsaboutNobody pays for open source. We can force them to.September 13, 2026·23 min readThe first time I thought it would be a good idea to write a blog post about the economics of open source was 2013, so this post has been in the works a while. The closest I got before today was 2022, when I wrote a stream-of-consciousness rant into my iOS notes that ended with basically "nothing fucking works". And then that sat there for 4 more years, because "nothing works" is too depressing to bother writing 5000 words about. Now, finally, I have an idea. It's gonna take 5000 words to get there, though, so if you don't have that kind of time, skip to the part about registries.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Seldo.
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