[image] FOSDEM 2026 - The terrible economics of package registries and how to fix them The title is a bit dishonest as it doesn’t really tell how to fix them, but at least i think this talk has the quality of being a great conversation starter. As we are all aw…

Can I say, first, thank you for posting this. Second, wow wow wow, Michael Winser does a great job in that talk. Everybody should watch it. It really is great. Third, I would very, very much like to read the discussion that might emerge from people watching that talk and commenting here. It’ll …

What is the current cost of opam infrastructure? Are there any figures around? How this cost or the underlying metrics (e.g. number of monthly downloads) is growing? What could be decentralized? Can a peer2peer protocol reduce some parts of the infrastructure, e.g. on download servers? I understand…

It’s worth watching the talk. he discussed -at length- download bandwidth, caching, etc. And how that’s just not a problem. It comes up repeatedly in the Q&A, and that causes him to really insist on the point, with the chiming-in of other maintainers in the audience. For a little taste: he puts …

[image] dmentre: What could be decentralized? Can a peer2peer protocol reduce some parts of the infrastructure, e.g. on download servers? Opam is actually already decentralized. See this thread Opam package decentralization

[image] yawaramin: Opam is actually already decentralized. See this thread Opam package decentralization Can be, but isn’t for the vast majority of non enterprise users. [image] Chet_Murthy: And …. “security development” is, literally, last place on the list. Some good news in that re…

Thanks for the link to the talk. This was very interesting. My perspective is: we need to work more on supply chain security (thanks @Khady and OCSF to support my work on conex) this only-growing opam-repository leads to lots of resource usage (being it on the clients, for documentation generatio…

I know I’m not one of the interested parties, but I’ve been thinking for a long time that opam-repository seems to have further pressures than other language-specific registries. opam’s is the only one that I know of which: Manually approves each published version, Discourages upper bounds upstrea…

I skimmed quickly through the lengthy discussion so I might missed something, but in my original post, the idea of peer2peer / decentralization what to reduce bandwidth need. In the post you mention, decentralization is more about having several packages providers. Like others, I think having a cent…

[Conversation starter] The terrible economics of package registries and how to fix them (FOSDEM 2026)

Ecosystem

yawaramin February 9, 2026, 8:50pm 5

Opam is actually already decentralized. See this thread Opam package decentralization

Topic		Replies	Views
Opam package decentralization Learning opam	17	810	February 10, 2026
Call for Volunteers to Help Maintain the Opam-Repository Community opam , community , opam-repository	0	607	April 11, 2025
Opam-repository: security and data integrity posture Ecosystem opam , opam-publish	15	2236	October 5, 2020
Call for new opam-repository maintainers Ecosystem opam , opam-repository	10	1529	December 2, 2023
Discussions on the future of the opam repository Community opam-repository	11	1885	March 18, 2024

[Conversation starter] The terrible economics of package registries and how to fix them (FOSDEM 2026)

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