I agree that it's hard to make money off infrastructure, but at some point maybe it makes sense for YC to start just donating money to the open source projects its startups are using or could otherwise benefit from. E.g. if PyPy got a hundred bucks for each YC startup using Python, I'd have to imagine they'd be able to make enough improvements to make it a no brainer to use, which would produce enormous savings across the portfolio in terms of EC2 bills and electricity usage.

One way or another there needs to be a mechanism for solving the free ridership problem, and it seems like doing this at the investor level is as good a place as any.