How to Sustain Open Source in the Era of AI? -- A SF community conversation on incentives, fairness, and the future of the software commons

Open source built the internet in Silicon Valley, yet its future is in jeopardy. Most of us have felt some version of this. But it's worth being precise about why the model that got us here no longer ensures the ecosystem can sustain itself — and why AI is bringing the question to a head now. Why the FOSS model no longer ensures sustainability The dependency-graph visibility paradox. Value propagates upward through software stacks; compensation does not. The deeper a library sits below the application layer, the more critical it is to everything above — and the less visible it is to anyone with a budget. That isn't incidental; it's a structural property of how abstraction works. The organizations benefiting most from foundational infrastructure are precisely the ones most insulated from…