Having open indices charge money is the “easy” part, relatively speaking. The author is correct that most companies will grumble a bit and then fork over the nominal amount of money needed to preserve their existing assumptions.
I think the rest of this don’t really work in practice though: it’s actually incredibly hard to distribute money to open source maintainers across hundreds of jurisdictions, and it’s not immediately obvious how a service like PyPI (which is barely funded to maintain and sustain itself) would shoulder such a burden without diverting a very large fraction of that money for things that would make people upset (read: lawyers and tax professionals).
(NPM would appear to be the exception to this since it has - at least on paper - the legal resources of Microsoft behind it. But I think it’s largely a quirk of history that the JavaScript packaging ecosystem ended up with a single corporate owner, and no ecosystem I’ve worked with seems eager to pursue a similar relationship.)
Having open indices charge money is the “easy” part, relatively speaking. The author is correct that most companies will grumble a bit and then fork over the nominal amount of money needed to preserve their existing assumptions.
I think the rest of this don’t really work in practice though: it’s actually incredibly hard to distribute money to open source maintainers across hundreds of jurisdictions, and it’s not immediately obvious how a service like PyPI (which is barely funded to maintain and sustain itself) would shoulder such a burden without diverting a very large fraction of that money for things that would make people upset (read: lawyers and tax professionals).
(NPM would appear to be the exception to this since it has - at least on paper - the legal resources of Microsoft behind it. But I think it’s largely a quirk of history that the JavaScript packaging ecosystem ended up with a single corporate owner, and no ecosystem I’ve worked with seems eager to pursue a similar relationship.)