Prosperous Software Movement

The Prosperous Software Movement (PSM) is an initiative by the Public Goods Foundation (PGF) designed to fix the broken economics of open-source software. We are introducing a structural framework that embeds financial sustainability directly into the code ecosystem, ensuring that critical utility libraries are reliably resourced.

Our model operates through three tightly coupled layers:

1. The Public Prosperity License (PPL v1.0): This is a new legal standard that features a "profit-left" clause. It guarantees that core open-source freedoms—the right to study, fork, modify, and distribute code—remain entirely free for individuals, academic researchers, and non-profits. However, it establishes a clear legal obligation for downstream corporate entities exceeding a specific revenue threshold (e.g., $1M) to contribute a percentage of their revenue back to their upstream software dependencies.
2. Native Technical Infrastructure: To make compliance completely painless for companies, we have built a cross-ecosystem Rust module wrapped for major package managers like npm, crates.io, and pip. Operating through native package manager post-install hooks, it allows enterprise developers to authenticate their organization's payment credentials just once during initial setup. These credentials secure-cache across local development, testing, and production environments, enabling subsequent PPL-licensed packages to install silently while automatically logging the financial commitment.
3. Transitive Graph Distribution: To eliminate the "visibility bias" of typical direct donations—which only favor high-profile, user-facing frameworks—our payment rails connect straight to algorithmic dependency-mapping protocols and distribution engines like Open Collective. This ensures that corporate funding automatically routes down the entire transitive dependency graph, directly resourcing the hidden, deep-stack libraries that keep the internet secure.

The mission of the Prosperous Software Movement is to keep the open-source software community open, prosperous, and independent. We believe that digital infrastructure is a garden that needs tending, not a machine to be mined. By introducing enforceable reciprocity via the Public Prosperity License alongside automated payment rails, we aim to transition the open-source model from fragile volunteerism to structured resilience.

Modern digital infrastructure suffers from a fundamental decoupling between value creation and value capture, leading to developer burnout, security vulnerabilities, and projects abandoning open stewardship. This structural crisis is driven by three specific factors documented in our research:

1. The Dependency-Graph Visibility Paradox: Value propagates upward through software abstraction layers, but financial compensation does not. The deeper a foundational library sits within a software stack, the more critical it is to the system above it, yet it remains completely invisible to enterprise procurement departments and corporate budgets.
2. Outdated License Paradigms: Legacy permissive licenses (such as MIT, Apache, and GPL) were optimized for peer-to-peer sharing among researchers and hobbyists. They were never designed to govern the severe economic power asymmetry between multi-trillion-dollar commercial enterprises that free-ride on public code and the individual, unsalaried maintainers holding up the infrastructure.
3. VC and Commercial Misalignment: Venture capital structures demand exit-driven returns that are fundamentally incompatible with open-source infrastructure maintenance. As a result, critical dependencies are left under-resourced, turning volunteer-run software stacks into severe digital supply chain security risks (as seen in exploits like XZ Utils).

The Prosperous Software Movement addresses this systemic imbalance by moving away from voluntary donations toward an integrated framework of built-in compliance and frictionless payment routing:

<u>- Enforceable Reciprocity via the PPL:</u> The Public Prosperity License establishes a clear legal standard requiring companies extraction massive economic value from the software commons to automatically reinvest back into its maintenance, while keeping the software open and free for non-commercial public use.
<u>- Frictionless Developer Implementation:</u> By utilizing package manager post-install hooks and local credential caching, the technical infrastructure intercepts the enterprise workflow invisibly. This structure bypasses procurement barriers, transforming compliance into a streamlined operational expense.
<u>- Transitive Graph Distribution:</u> The payment rails connect directly to algorithmic dependency-mapping protocols (such as thanks.dev, Drips, or Open Collective hooks). This allows corporate funds to route programmatically through the entire chain of underlying dependencies, injecting predictable capital directly to the deep-stack libraries that keep the internet secure.

Global Digital Commons (The impact applies natively across borderless developer ecosystems, language registries, and open-source infrastructure software globally)