Open Infrastructure Is Not Free: a Joint Statement on Sustainable Stewardship

If the costs were all bandwidth related I would agree. Most open source package managers benefit from Fastly's generous donation of credits. Even if one ignores the single-provider-point-of-failure risk, the reality is that the development and operational costs of running package managers is much more than just networking bandwidth and more is needed.

Malware scanning, AI slopsquatting, and typosquatting are just a few of the things that package managers do today. Implementing emerging standards like Trusted Publishing ( https://repos.openssf.org/trusted-publishers-for-all-package... ), the Principles for Package Repository Security ( https://repos.openssf.org/principles-for-package-repository-... ), and improved infrastructure hardening will all important.

The key insight is that these are services that require development and operations budgets that scale with their usage.

I think you're obliquely referring to me there.

I covered some of this in one of my previous blogs where i talked about the systemic challenges here that I've uncovered. The heavy users that I spoke to, 100% of them had a repository manager, some Nexus, others Artifactory. And yet the high levels of consumption still persisted. I discussed some of the reasons for this in the blog link below... but I think this refutes the theory that simply having yet another caching proxy solves the problem. It really doesn't. Additionally as Mike discussed, bandwidth is only part of the challenge. Without the people behind the repositories doing the malware response, the curation of namespaces etc, there wouldn't be anything to proxy anyway.

https://www.sonatype.com/blog/free-isnt-free-the-hidden-cost...

Please see my other reply about network costs. Bandwidth is a real cost that does not currently show up on the balance sheet because of Fastly's generous donations.

That said, I would love to see more organizations implement private staging repositories for their upstream package supply. This is where they can and should apply policies to protect their applications.

Developing a single multi-protocol or even multiple open source caching proxies will cost real time and money. I'd love to see more solutions here but at this stage it will take more than a few volunteers and a "PRs welcome" in the README.

The commercial CDNs sponsor bandwidth for almost every FOSS project there is. For example the canonical Debian package distribution website deb.debian.org is CDN sponsored.