few months, a beloved open source project dies. The maintainer posts a goodbye note. Twitter mourns for 48 hours. Someone forks it. And then we do it again. The narrative that follows is always the same: burnout. The maintainer was overwhelmed by issue volume, toxic users, feature demands, zero pay. We need to treat maintainers better. All of that is true. None of it is the actual problem. The actual problem is that open source has an implicit contract that nobody agreed to explicitly, and that contract is insane. Here's what the contract says: You write software. You put it on the internet for free. Anyone can use it. By putting it there, you implicitly agree to maintain it indefinitely, answer questions about it for free, fix bugs caused by other people's misuse of it, keep up with breaking changes in adjacent tooling, and do all of this on your own time at your own cost. The user, meanwhile, has zero obligations.…