How to Sustain Open Source Software in the Era of AI? -- A SF community chat on incentives, fairness, and the future of the software commons
Open source built the internet in Silicon Valley, yet its future is in jeopardy.
Most of us have felt some version of this. But it's worth being precise about why the model that got us here no longer ensures the ecosystem can sustain itself — and why AI is bringing the question to a head now.
Why the FOSS model no longer ensures sustainability
The dependency-graph visibility paradox. Value propagates upward through software stacks; compensation does not. The deeper a library sits below the application layer, the more critical it is to everything above — and the less visible it is to anyone with a budget. That isn't incidental; it's a structural property of how abstraction works. The organizations benefiting most from foundational infrastructure are precisely the ones most insulated from perceiving it.
The licenses predate the relationship they now govern. MIT, Apache, and GPL were built for communities with aligned incentives — peers sharing among researchers and hobbyists. They optimize for sharing, not for governing a power asymmetry between trillion-dollar enterprises and individual maintainers with no salary and no recourse. Companies free-ride because the license gives them every right to. The model was never designed for this relationship.
VC incentives don't align with stewardship — and AI is compounding the gap. Venture capital is optimized for returns at exit, and funding your OSS dependencies produces no return at exit — it's pure externality from an LP's perspective. Even companies with genuine intentions face that structural pressure. And AI foundation models have now accelerated the extraction rate exponentially: training on open source corpora at scale, compressing decades of accumulated work into model weights, with no compensation mechanism proposed or enforceable. The clearest sign of the gap: when developers sued over models trained on millions of public repositories, the case became one of the most closely watched AI copyright disputes heading into 2026 — yet courts let the license claim proceed while largely dismissing the developers' demand for compensation. The extraction is visible. The recourse isn't.
This is the start of a conversation, not a conclusion.
We don't think anyone has fully solved this yet — ourselves included. The Prosperous Software Movement begins from a single conviction: that sustainability should be structural, not dependent on goodwill. Everything past that — what the mechanism is, who it serves, how it works — is exactly what we want to think through with the people who live this problem, rather than hand down as answers.
So we're gathering the community to begin.
Come to:
Talk through, in the open, why the current model falls short
Meet maintainers, developers, and the companies that depend on them
Help shape what a more sustainable model could look like — and pressure-test the ideas, including ours
This is the first gathering of a community we're hoping to build. Bring your perspective — that's the point.
Join our Telegram group to stay in touch: https://t.me/prosperous_software
We are also seeking advisors to help build the movement.
Feel free to buy a drink at the famous House of Shields to support one of our favourite bars in SF.
🗓 [Thursday, June 11, 6 pm-8:30 pm] · 📍 [Venue, SF] · 🎟 Free — RSVP to save your spot