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Open source package repositories like Maven Central are facing a sustainability crisis driven by massive, careless consumption from large organizations. Sonatype CTO Brian Fox revealed that 82% of Maven Central's traffic comes from less than 1% of IPs, with 80% from the big three hyperscalers. Companies are treating repositories as free CDNs, with some downloading the same 10,000 components a million times per month. Last year, major repositories handled 10 trillion downloads total. Registries are now considering tiered payment models where high-volume commercial users would pay per download, while hobbyists and small developers remain free. The OpenSSF issued an open letter in September 2025 calling for mandatory contributions from heavy users. Beyond bandwidth costs, underfunded repositories also lack resources for critical security features needed to combat supply chain attacks.

Open source package repositories face sustainability crisis