Understand the stance, but the big corps using it (Apple, Google, Microsoft) are using it and acknowledge it silently at risk. It's not entirely fair though, Google did make a donation.
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Yup. $10 000.
Remind me what the average Google salary is? Or how much profit Google made that year?
Or better still, what is the livable wage is where libxml maintainer lives? You know, the maintainer of the library used in the core Google Product?
What would a fair model look like? An open-source infrastructure endowment? Ongoing support contracts per critical library?
At the same time, I think there’s a tension in open source we don’t talk about enough: it’s built to be free and open to all, including the corporations we might wish were more generous. No one signed a contract!
As the article states, Libxml2 was widely promoted (and adopted) as the go-to XML parser. Now, the maintainer is understandably tired. There is now a sustainability problem that is more systemic than personal. How much did the creator of libxml benefit?
I don’t think we should expect companies to do the right thing just because they benefit and it isn’t how open source was meant to be and this isn’t how open source is supposed to work
But maybe that’s the real problem