Welcome to Open Channels News, your trusted source for the latest updates in open source, digital communities, and the infrastructure powering the web. In today’s episode, Robert Jacobi breaks down the week’s headlines and asks: who supports us when we need it most?
The Man Cold and the Support System Crisis:
Robert Jacobi shares a tongue-in-cheek take on the legendary “man cold,” reflecting on the universal need for comfort and sympathy during sickness and the often invisible work behind every support system 00:53.
Who Pays for Open Source?:
Lori Voss poses the hard question: massive companies depend on open source, but almost no one pays. Past solutions haven’t fixed the structural problems, and new licensing ideas challenge what “open” really means 02:36.
WordPress and the Open Website Alliance:
Mary Hubbard steps in as president of the Open Website Alliance, a move to help align organizations behind an open, interoperable, and decentralized web, even as proprietary platforms grow more powerful 04:34.
Each story reveals how crucial support systems are for individuals, projects, and the health of the open web. Stay tuned as Robert Jacobi connects the dots and highlights why every dependency—code or otherwise—matters.
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Takeaways
- Support Systems Are Crucial: Robert highlights how support is necessary in various contexts—whether it’s personal (like being sick), maintaining open source software, or supporting large decentralized communities such as WordPress.
- The “Man Cold” Phenomenon: Robert humorously describes his personal experience with the so-called “man cold,” touching on both societal stereotypes and limited scientific evidence, ultimately emphasizing how personal experiences of illness feel more significant than statistics.
- Persistent Challenges in Funding Open Source: The open source ecosystem faces ongoing financial challenges: despite its fundamental role in tech, massive consumption by companies rarely leads to sufficient compensation or sustainable funding for maintainers.
- Proposed Licensing Changes for Open Source: Some, like Lori Voss, advocate for new licensing models where large companies would be required to pay for open source while individuals and small teams might continue to use it freely, igniting debates about what still qualifies as “open source.”
- Tension Between Openness and Sustainability: There’s a fundamental conflict between traditional open source definitions (which emphasize non-discrimination and openness) and the need for economic sustainability to support ongoing software maintenance.
- Evolving Challenges for the Open Web: The open web now contends not just with browser standards and proprietary software, but also with challenges from AI, social networks, app ecosystems, and centralized platforms, making coordination among communities increasingly essential.
- The Role of Organizations Like the Open Website Alliance: With Mary Hubbard as its new president, the Open Website Alliance aims to coordinate diverse stakeholders and ensure interoperability, user choice, and decentralized publishing remain core principles of the web while acknowledging that achieving consensus is inherently messy.
- Invisible Work is Foundational: Robert underscores that the independence seen in open source and open web projects is underpinned by a vast amount of invisible work whether from individual maintainers or collective community effort.
- Appreciation for All Kinds of Support: The episode concludes with a call to respect and acknowledge support systems whether that’s someone bringing tea during a cold, developers maintaining code, or organizations navigating the complexity of keeping the web open.
Important Links and Resources
- Lori Voss Essay (“Nobody pays for open source. We can force them to.”) – An essay proposing new licensing ideas to address the sustainability of open source funding.
🔗 https://seldo.com/posts/nobody-pays-for-open-source-we-can-force-them-to/ - Open Website Alliance (WordPress Community Initiative) – An alliance aimed at supporting a free, open, and interoperable web, recently appointing Mary Hubbard as president.
🔗 https://wordpress.org/news/2026/09/owa-president/
🔗 https://openwebsitealliance.org/
Episode Transcript
Robert Jacobi:
Welcome to OCN, the Open Channels News broadcast. Today is September 24th, 2026, and I’m your host, Robert Jacobi. Today we’re talking about support systems. Who supports us when we’re sick? Who supports open source software when everybody uses it but nobody wants to pay for it? And who helps coordinate a community as large and decentralized as WordPress?
But first, we begin with the most serious threat facing humanity. The man cold. For the last 48 hours, I have personally been conducting extensive research into a condition commonly known as the man cold, and I can now confirm that it is terrible.
For those unfamiliar with the man cold, this is the phenomenon where a relatively ordinary cold experienced by a man is perceived, usually by the man, as a medical event requiring blankets, tea, tissues, medication, sympathy, and possibly the settling of one’s affairs. I have had the opportunity to experience this firsthand, and I understand the skepticism.
There is even a term for it because the stereotype is so familiar. Men supposedly become dramatically more helpless when they get sick. But there has actually been research asking whether there could be a biological difference in how men and women respond to respiratory infections. Some studies have explored whether hormones and immune response may affect the severity of symptoms. That does not mean that science has officially declared a man cold a catastrophic medical condition.
Unfortunately, the broader evidence is mixed, and there are plenty of social and behavioral explanations for why people experience or communicate illness differently. But after 48 hours of personal research, I feel qualified to say this: when you have a cold, statistics are irrelevant. Your sample size is one. You feel terrible. And you would like everyone around you to acknowledge this important fact.
So I’m happy to report that I appear to be surviving. Recovery is underway. I expect a full investigation into why nobody has delivered soup. And that explains our missing episodes.
Now to an illness the open source world has been dealing with for considerably longer than 48 hours: money. Laurie Voss recently published an essay with a deliberately provocative title, “Nobody Pays for Open Source. We Can Force Them To.” The argument starts with a problem that should sound familiar. Companies worth billions of dollars depend on open source software maintained by individuals or very small teams. Everybody benefits, very few people pay.
And this is not a new problem. We have tried donations, sponsorships, foundations, corporate contribution programs, open-core business models, dual licensing, commercial support. And of course, the time-honored open source funding strategy of putting a tiny sponsor button on a repository and hoping somebody at a Fortune 500 feels generous.
The problem is structural. Open source is extraordinarily easy to consume without creating any economic relationship with the people maintaining it. That is one of its greatest strengths. It’s also one of its greatest weaknesses.
Voss proposes changing that equation using licenses that would require sufficiently large companies to pay while allowing individuals and smaller organizations to continue using software freely. And immediately we hit the interesting part: is that still open source? Under the traditional open source definition, probably not. Open source licenses generally cannot discriminate against particular users or fields of endeavor. You cannot simply say the code is open unless you’re a giant company, in which case, please get your credit card.
So this is really a debate about what we value more: strict adherence to the existing definition of open source, or finding new mechanisms that make maintaining widely used software economically sustainable. And I think we’re going to have a lot more of these conversations, because AI is making software easier to create. It’s not making maintainers free. Servers aren’t free. Security isn’t free. Support isn’t free. And the person fixing a dependency at 2 in the morning definitely is not free. The code may cost nothing to download. The ecosystem absolutely costs something to operate. The question is, who gets the bill?
And finally, WordPress is formalizing another kind of support. The WordPress Project has announced that Mary Hubbard will serve as president of the Open Website Alliance. Hubbard has been deeply involved in WordPress leadership and brings experience spanning the project, its community, and the broader open web ecosystem.
The Open Website Alliance is designed to bring together organizations and individuals around something that sounds simple, but increasingly is not. Keeping the web open. That means supporting interoperability, user choice, open standards, decentralized publishing, and the ability to build and publish without requiring permission from a handful of giant platforms.
20 years ago, that argument was mostly about browser standards and proprietary software. Today, it includes AI platforms, social networks, app ecosystems, cloud infrastructure, identity systems, and increasingly the interfaces through which people discover information.
That makes coordination much more important, because the open web has always had a structural disadvantage. Closed platforms can make a decision in a meeting. Open ecosystems have meetings about when to have the meeting, and that can be really frustrating, but it’s also what makes them open. Nobody owns the whole thing.
The challenge is creating enough coordination to compete with centralized platforms without recreating the centralized control you were trying to avoid in the first place. It’s why organizations like the Open Website Alliance potentially matter. Not because one organization gets to define the open web. Quite the opposite. The job is getting a lot of independent organizations moving in roughly the same direction while allowing them to be independent. It’s messy. Open source has always been messy. The trick is making the mess productive and useful.
So that’s the thread, uh, for today. The man cold requires a support system consisting primarily of sympathy, tissues, and more soup than I’m currently receiving. Open source maintainers need a support system that turns massive software adoption into sustainable funding. And the open web needs organizations capable of coordinating communities that deliberately do not have a single owner.
Different kinds of support, same basic problem. Things that look independent usually depend on an enormous amount of invisible work underneath them. Sometimes that’s a maintainer keeping a library alive. Sometimes it’s a community keeping the web open. And sometimes it’s somebody bringing you tea while you explain once again just how serious your code really is. Respect your dependencies, software and otherwise.
And that’s OCN for September 24th, 2026. I’m Robert Jacobi. Be open and stay secure.
