Skip to content
Open Source Maintenance Fee Open Source Maintenance Fee

Which projects do you pay?

You only pay Maintenance Fees for the projects you use, so the first step is to catalog the projects you use. To be clear, you do NOT need to include the projects your projects depends on, only the projects you directly use.

Fortunately, most programming ecosystems provide package managers that can map code dependencies to the Open Source Project that produced them. However, do not forget to include any tools from Open Source Projects used by your developers or in your build and continuous integration processes which may not be referenced by a package manager.

Once you have the list of projects, you can check each project’s README file for instructions on how to pay the Maintenance Fee.

The following are some popular programming ecosystem examples how to find the projects you depend on by using their package managers.

.NET Example

  1. Open each .csproj and collect the unique PackageReference identifiers. For example:

    <ItemGroup>
      <PackageReference Id="WixToolset.Dtf" Version="6.0.0" />
    </ItemGroup>

  2. Search for that identifier on NuGet.org

  3. Click the “Project website” link on the right to be taken to the project.

  4. Follow the instructions in the project’s README file how to pay the Fee for a project

JS Example

  1. Open each package.json and collect the packages dependencies, including dev dependencies

    {
      ...
       "dependencies": {
         "project1": "^0.0.1"
       },
       "devDependencies": {
         "project2": "^0.0.2"
       },
       ...
    }

  2. Search for the package identifiers on NPM

  3. Click the “Project website” link on the right to be taken to the project.

  4. Follow the instructions in the project’s README file how to pay the Fee for a project