Open source is still broken

• Daily Tips
• November 13, 2025

Earlier this year, I wrote about how open source is kind of broken.

The tl;dr version:

1. Big companies profit immensely from free labor and give little or nothing back.
2. Sponsorship models generate very little money, even for popular projects.
3. “Sticky” licenses like GPL do not stop companies from profiteering. It’s only problematic for them if they redistribute the software they create.
4. Pro Tiers with unique features gatekeep hobbyists and people doing public good—the very folks you’d most want to benefit from open source—from access, and are a hard sell unless your project is big and popular.
5. Sponsorware, where you only build/add features if you get $X/month in sponsorships, have all of the same problems of items 2 and 4.
6. Dual License, where a project is free and open for personal use, but costs money for commercial use, fix the problems of the Pro Tier model, but are still a hard sell unless you have a big project.

This week, I got yet another reminder of how broken this all is.

The mysterious case of Quiet UI

Quiet UI was a gorgeous, feature rich web component library spun up earlier this year by Cory LaViska, the dude behind Shoelace (and now Web Awesome).

While his style of building web components is not the way I’d approach things, the library was packed with interesting experiments and features.

Cory launched it with a license similar to Kelp’s fair code Commons License: free for personal and non-commercial use, with a paid commercial option.

After a month or two, Cory had sold just two or three licenses, and decided to switch to MIT licensed. In a now-deleted blog post, he talked about feeling hindered by the lack of adoption, and his frustration that companies will pay massive salaries to devs but won’t spend $100 or so on something that will save hundreds of hours of work.

He launched a sponsorship model, with sponsors getting access to prioritized bug fixes and such.

Then… poof! 💨

Then, less than two weeks later, he pulled the project off GitHub, removed all documentation, and deleted the blog post about it.

Quiet UI is no longer available to the general public. I will continue to maintain it as my personal creative outlet, but I am unable to release it to the world at this time.

Thanks for understanding. I’m really sorry for the inconvenience.

Now, Cory still works at Web Awesome. And there was a lot of overlap between the projects and the project design.

It’s entirely possible that was a big part of what caused this. Maybe he was asked to take it down by his employer. Maybe not. I dunno, I’m just speculating.

But even if that is what happened, the reality is that people were unwilling to pay a small license fee for a tremendous amount of work from a very talented developer with a track record of solid products.

I’m over it

Candidly, I’m seeing the same thing with Kelp.

I have no plans to switch to a “real” OSS license like MIT, because in our current political climate, being able to explicitly forbid fascists from using my labor is invaluable.

But I totally understand that pull Cory felt to see his work actually used by people. It’s frustrating to build something awesome AF, and have no one use it.

Open source is so deeply, fundamentally broken.