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The Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF), together with several prominent open-source and software foundations, has issued a joint statement declaring that it can no longer serve as the unpaid gatekeeper of the global software supply chain. The foundation emphasized that enterprises must begin contributing financially to the open-source infrastructure in proportion to their scale of use.
The statement was co-signed by the following organizations: Eclipse Foundation, OpenJS Foundation, OpenSSF, Python Software Foundation, Rust Foundation, AlphaOmega Foundation, Packagist, and Sonatype.
Today, both the technology sector and countless other industries rely heavily on the software supply chain and open-source infrastructure. These foundations collectively handle trillions of package downloads each month, yet their operations often survive only on donations, grants, and the goodwill of a handful of sponsors.
The statement bluntly warned: “Beyond package registries, open source projects also rely on essential systems for building, testing, analyzing, deploying, and distributing software. These also include content delivery networks (CDNs) that offer global reach and performance at scale, along with donated (usually cloud) computing power and storage to support them.”
Adding to the strain, continuous integration systems and large-scale scanners bombard software supply chains with automated requests, while container builds exert enormous pressure on infrastructure. Meanwhile, AI agents scraping repositories at scale further exacerbate the problem.
According to OpenSSF, all of this constitutes wasteful usage, where the costs are unfairly borne by the maintainers and infrastructure providers, not by those generating the demand. Such a model, they warned, is fundamentally unsustainable.
OpenSSF argued that enterprises must contribute financially to the software supply chains and infrastructures they depend upon, ensuring a stable funding stream to maintain compliance, security, and operational reliability. Without sustained investment, long-term underfunding will leave these critical systems vulnerable to breakdowns.
At present, most of the software supply chain and open-source infrastructure survives on unpaid labor and sporadic donations. If this situation persists, it could lead to severe disruptions across the global software ecosystem. The foundation stressed the need to resolve funding challenges to better support the maintainers who form the backbone of open source.
The OpenSSF outlined several potential paths forward:
- Commercial and institutional partnerships: Enterprises could fund infrastructure proportionally to their usage or in exchange for strategic benefits.
- Tiered access models: Infrastructure might remain free for individuals and light users while offering paid reliability tiers for organizations with large-scale demands.
- Value-added services: Businesses may find premium offerings—such as detailed usage analytics—worth subscribing to, thereby providing another source of financial support.
The foundation stressed that the situation has not yet reached a full-blown crisis but should serve as an inflection point. Without decisive action to reform the current model, the very foundations of modern software risk collapse. Through shared responsibility, coordinated effort, and sustained investment, however, these systems can remain resilient, secure, and open to all.
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