Denis Pushkarev, maintainer of the core-js library used by millions of websites, says he’s ready to give up open source development because so few people pay for the software upon which they depend.

“Free open source software is fundamentally broken,” he wrote in a note on the core-js repository. “I could stop working on this silently, but I want to give open source one last chance.”

The issue of who pays for open source software, often created or managed by unpaid volunteers, continues to be a source of friction and discontent in the coding community.

Feross Aboukhadijeh, an open source developer and CEO of security biz Socket, had a lot to say on the subject in an email to The Register:

For the large companies that get more from the free labor in open source code than they pay out in donations – if indeed they pay out – the status quo looks like a pretty good deal.

For individual developers, however, code creation and maintenance without compensation has a cost – measurable not just in financial terms, but also in social and political capital.

For Pushkarev, known as zloirock on GitHub, the situation is that core-js is a JavaScript library that’s been downloaded billions of times and used on more than half of the top 10,000 websites – but the income he receives from donations has fallen dramatically. When he started maintaining core-js full time he could count on about $2,500 per month, and that’s down to about $400 per month at present.

There are various reasons for this. One is that Pushkarev is in Russia, which since the illegal invasion of Ukraine has been subject to broad financial sanctions. It also didn’t help that he served about ten months in prison in 2020 for colliding with two pedestrians on his motorcycle