I want to raise a design question that I believe is foundational to 4opens, but not yet explicitly addressed. 4opens correctly rejects hidden power, enclosure, opaque governance, and capture. However, most common survival mechanisms for creators, including wage labor, employment contracts, venture funding, and closed commercialization, themselves introduce opaque authority, dependency, or control. In practice, this creates a tension: Wage labor is often energy-extractive and incompatible with sustained infrastructure or research work. Employment and funding arrangements tend to introduce invisible decision power. “Work on it in spare time” implicitly selects for people with surplus energy, wealth, or institutional backing. This raises a core question: How are creators expected to sustain themselves while producing 4opens-aligned work, without reintroducing hidden power or relying on self-sacrifice? I am not arguing against 4opens principles. I am arguing that survival is a design constraint that shapes governance, licensing, and organizational choices, and should be addressed explicitly rather than treated as an externality. I am intentionally starting with this question alone. Depending on responses, I expect to open follow-up discussions on governance structure, licensing choices, and transition rules, but those discussions are incomplete without an explicit survival model. I am interested in hearing what models are considered compatible with 4opens, what trade-offs are accepted, and where the framework currently has open gaps.