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  • OOTSoots@infosec.exchange
    Oct 23, 2026, 7:34 AM

    @ondrej

    Maybe we should coin a new term for this, like we have a term for "technical debt".

    In technical debt:
    - Companies save money by not investing enough into maintaining their systems.
    - The technical debt doesn't show up on a balance sheet, therefore everything looks okay to the management.
    - But eventually the debt comes due and you have to upgrade and that costs time/money. The more you "saved", the more you have to pay for the upgrade.

    Here the debt is not necessarily technical (you could be running the latest version), but one step further detached:
    - Companies "save" money by not supporting the people who maintain their open source components.
    - This doesn't show up on a balance sheet, so everything looks okay to the management.
    - But eventually the maintainers lose interest or refuse to do free work for big tech companies without payment/support or have other things to do or whatever. And then you have to pay for a solution like
    - having someone else (inside your org) maintaining the solution, or
    - migrating to a different software
    - or you just keep running poorly maintained or unmaintained software, at which time this debt converts into (normal) technical debt.

    I don't have a good name for this type of debt, yet. Maybe "indirect technical debt"? "Open Source debt"? "Maintainer drain debt"? Any ideas?

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  • Dr. Christopher Kunzchristopherkunz@chaos.social
    Oct 23, 2026, 7:53 AM

    @ondrej Could the compliance avenue be a way to end this? I mean, most companies have anti-slavery / anti-exploitative workplace compliance regulation in place. What if "not paying for OSS usage in revenue bearing products" was defined as exploitative...?

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  • Taran Rampersadknowprose@mastodon.social
    Oct 23, 2026, 10:27 AM

    @christopherkunz @ondrej in theory, sure, but the FOSS licenses themselves allow for it.

    Some more than others.

    Side note: And this ties to vibe coding llms trained on FOSS as well.

    We have always had the problem of non-payment in FOSS from companies that depend on their use. It's been on my mind since the 90s and impacted what I worked on.

    In a world where wolves find openings, we need better armed sheep. 🤔

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  • Ondřej Surýondrej@sury.org
    Oct 23, 2026, 10:33 AM

    @knowprose @christopherkunz Absolutely not! We need more ethical wolves, not better armed sheep. In other words, we need less selfish society and less divided less exploitative people.

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  • pmarshysteretic@mas.to
    Oct 23, 2026, 10:28 AM

    @christopherkunz @ondrej isn't this a question of the license? I am not an expert, but MIT allows people to exploit you, while other licenses disallow commercial use so you'd need to negotiate a license deal.

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