Open Source Is Free—Until It's Not: The CNCF and the Cost of 'Free' Infrastructure

If you've ever spun up a Kubernetes cluster, deployed a container, or even touched a modern cloud-native stack, chances are you've benefitted from a sprawling web of free tools maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). The code is there, the documentation is often excellent, and the projects—like Prometheus, Envoy, Fluentd, and Helm—are stable, battle-tested, and trusted by some of the world's biggest tech players. But the whole thing sits on a knife's edge. One comment summed it up perfectly: "Imaging all the free tools in the CNCF community—all the free work—and a lot of companies turning on them. What if one day we need to buy everything?" That hits hard. It's not just hypothetical—it's a quiet anxiety humming under the surface of the open source world. ## The Beautiful Illusion of "Free" Open source is often celebrated like a utopia: free tools, global collaboration, and decentralized power. But under the hood, it's a little messier. Many of these projects are maintained by a handful of individuals—or even just one. They might be getting by on sponsorships, side gigs, or personal dedication. The infrastructure of the internet is being held together by volunteers who might burn out or walk away at any time. Take the xz compression library, for example. As someone pointed out, it had a single full-time maintainer. When a backdoor exploit hit that project, it sparked chaos. That's how brittle some of this stuff really is. Then there's the classic XKCD comic: a massive tower of modern software balanced precariously on one tiny, crucial component maintained by "a random person in Nebraska." It's funny—until you realize it's real. ## CNCF: Where the Best Tools Live, But Not Always Thrive The CNCF acts as a sort of home base for many of these tools. And yes, it brings structure, marketing, and visibility. But it doesn't always mean sustainability. While Kubernetes itself has serious backing—with top contributors often employed by Google, Red Hat, and VMware—the same can't always be said for its dependencies. Think of it like this: Kubernetes is the well-funded, shiny skyscraper... but it's sitting on an aging subway system that no one's maintaining. As one commenter put it, "What about all the libraries, frameworks, and other dependencies they use, huh?" That's the uncomfortable truth. And while some argued that the narrative is overly romanticized—that a lot of open source contributions come from big corporate engineers paid well for their time—this doesn't change the underlying problem: big tech only funds what aligns with its own business interests. Everything else is left to community goodwill. ## The Freemium Model Creeps In A sharp comment made a comparison that feels more accurate the more you think about it: "A lot of CNCF is more freemium than free. Like mobile gaming: the entire industry is fueled by whales so the rest of us can grind for free." That stings a little, but it's not wrong. Sure, you can use many of these tools for free. But increasingly, companies are building paid layers on top. Enterprise support, advanced features, integrations—it's all monetized. And that's not inherently bad. Developers need to eat. Startups need revenue. The issue is when open source becomes the bait and not the core mission. When users and maintainers alike are just fueling a freemium business model instead of building public digital infrastructure. ## Companies Turn On Their Roots What's even more disheartening is when companies that built themselves on the backs of open source tools later lock things down. We've seen open core projects shift licenses. MongoDB, Redis, and others have changed their terms to avoid being exploited by cloud providers. Again, the rationale makes sense: nobody wants to be AWS's unpaid R&D department. But from the outside, it feels like betrayal. A promise of freedom quietly rewritten. And users are left stuck. Build your business on something labeled "free," only to find yourself in licensing trouble a year later. ## The Cost of Not Paying Here's the real twist: when we treat open source as something that should always be free, we set ourselves up for disaster. Free tools with no funding can't scale. They can't offer security guarantees. They can't respond fast to threats. They can't take feature requests seriously. You get what you pay for, and in many cases, we're paying nothing and expecting everything. We forget that software doesn't build or maintain itself. Someone has to fix bugs at 2 a.m. Someone has to answer GitHub issues. Someone has to keep reading RFCs and rewriting code after their day job. The result? Burnout. Neglect. Or worst of all—compromise. ## So, What's the Solution? There's no one fix, but a few ideas come up again and again in the community. **Corporate Sponsorships Done Right:** Not just throwing money at the biggest name in the project, but funding the infrastructure, documentation, and lesser-known dependencies that make it all run. **Public Recognition:** Celebrating the unsung heroes of the open source world. Visibility can lead to opportunity. **More Transparent "Freemium" Models:** If a company is building on open source and offering premium tiers, be honest about it. Support the base and contribute back, don't just extract. **Government and Institutional Funding:** Open source is public infrastructure. Maybe it's time we treated it like one. ## The Human Side of Code In all this, it's easy to get lost in licenses, governance models, and business logic. But at the core, this is about people. People who build tools for free because they believe in something. People who wake up to news about a zero-day vulnerability in the thing they maintain on nights and weekends. People who could've cashed out but chose to stick around. As one commenter said, "There's always an option to cash out if your project gets big… if that's a concern." And maybe that's the point. Open source is powerful because it offers freedom—but it also needs protection. Not just from exploitation, but from our own unrealistic expectations. Because the day we have to buy everything? That might not be far off. And when it happens, we'll realize how much we took for granted.