When a widely used open-source library changes its licensing or introduces a commercial model, one reaction appears almost immediately:
“We can build this ourselves.”
And now, with AI-assisted coding, that argument sounds more convincing than ever.
But implementation is only one part of the cost.
The difficult question is what happens after version 1:
Who maintains it?
Who handles security issues?
Who preserves backward compatibility?
Who supports the edge cases accumulated over years of real-world production use?
Who owns the dependency five years from now?
I explored that question through the changes happening across the .NET ecosystem, including Polly, AutoMapper, MediatR, Fluent Assertions, and MassTransit.
The deeper issue isn’t whether open source should be free.
It’s whether software teams correctly understand the cost of ownership.
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