Near the end of most Open Source licenses, usually in capital letters, sits a clause that disclaims almost everything: no warranty, no liability, use at your own risk.

For an organization that depends on that code, the clause is harsh. If the code fails and takes your data or revenue with it, the license owes you nothing. No fix, no refund, and no one to explain what went wrong.

That is the Open Source license doing its job. It makes the code available and protects the people who share it. Without that protection, sharing code could become a gift that backfires: a generous act turned into unlimited legal risk.

But the license can only answer the legal questions: who may use the code, on what terms, and what risk the authors are willing to accept. It cannot tell you what kind of Open Source project you are working with.

Some Open Source is "License-only Open Source": code released under an Open Source license, without active stewardship or any promise of ongoing care. There is no guarantee of updates, fixes, security response, or long-term support.

Other Open Source is "Stewarded Open Source": code cared for as shared infrastructure. Maintainers review contributions, fix bugs, respond to security issues, manage releases, provide long-term support, and much more. Organizations fund maintainers, support core development, donate infrastructure, and absorb costs end users never see.

Both types of projects are Open Source, but they are not the same. A weekend hobby project and business-critical software can ship under the exact same license. Legally, they look identical. Practically, they are worlds apart.

The difference is stewardship. The license makes code available; stewardship makes it dependable. And the more people or organizations depend on a project, the more stewardship it often requires.

Responsibility is the tax on relevance.

Distinguishing license-only from stewarded Open Source gives us the vocabulary to describe two very different realities that the words "Open Source" alone do not capture.

For example, the distinction becomes useful when we talk about contribution. If a company depends on Open Source, should it give back?

For license-only Open Source, the answer is simple: no one is required to contribute. The code was shared freely, without a promise of care or an expectation of return.

For stewarded Open Source, the answer feels different. The license may say the software is provided as-is and used at your own risk. Stewardship begins when contributors, companies, or communities choose to absorb more of that risk than the license requires. It means taking responsibility for the ongoing care needed to keep the code usable, secure, and available, even when the license itself makes no such promise. It means someone is paying for your code.

I explored this more concretely in Open Source infrastructure deserves a business model and what it costs to run Drupal's infrastructure. Those posts focused on the economics, while this post is about the language.

When we call everything simply "Open Source", we hide the difference between code that was shared and infrastructure that is being cared for. Better language will not solve the funding problem by itself, but it makes the responsibility visible. And responsibility is where a more honest conversation begins.