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When Caddy made their announcement earlier this week, I shook my head with pity at what they were about to endure. I could have given them a list of all of the

When Caddy made their announcement earlier this week, I shook my head with pity at what they were about to endure. I could have given them a list of all of the shitty (and merely unhelpful) things people were going to say to them, because I've heard them all, too. There's a deep streak of meanness, and, as the post states, entitlement, in the OSS user community (much less so in the developer community, which doesn't overlap as much as it once did, though sometimes developers do it, too). And, the really awful thing is that if the project continues, it'll never stop. Every once in a while someone or some group will get a bee in their bonnet about the thing not being open enough, or the authors not following or not understanding the license (as though the copyright holder needs a license), charging too much for the one little thing they reserve for paying customers (no matter how small that amount is...we charge as little as $6/month, and we still get complaints about price). And, there's always a huge misconception that because an OSS project has a lot of users it must be making a lot of money, especially among the people who won't tolerate any action that would actually make money for the project. What I'm trying to say is that OSS is a hard-as-hell way to make a living (I've done it for my entire professional life, over two decades now), and there's gonna be a handful of users who will make it unpleasant. I love it when I can build some one-off thing and just throw it over the wall onto Github and never think about it again...where I can take a "use it or don't, but don't ask for my time" attitude. Making a business out of an OSS project makes it harder to select good users (who become good customers), though you have to in order to survive.

zbentley 9y ago
I agree with everything you said, but couldn't resist: The awful behaviors you see from some users of a previously free-and-open project that went closed (ish) sound an awful like the behaviors of . . . paying customers in pretty much every industry. https://talesfromawaitress.wordpress.com/ https://talesfromawaitress.wordpress.com/ https://clientsfromhell.net/ https://clientsfromhell.net/
- bad_user 9y ago
  Except that users of open source are not paying money and most of them aren't contributing or donating anything either. So the least such users can do is to be nice otherwise gtfo.
  - js2 9y ago
    You'd think that, but OTOH, they haven't invested anything so they have no incentive to be nice. You and I may wish people were nice as a matter of course, but sadly, not so much. :-( (To be clear, I think the really awful users are a just a very vocal minority.)
    - AndyNemmity 9y ago
      Investing doesn't give an incentive to be nice either.
- SwellJoe 9y ago
  If they're paying me (or if they're contributing in some way), I'll accept a certain level of belligerence. It's the assholes who think I'm gonna put up with their crap for free that most chap my hide, and I suspect OSS is unique in just how entitled people can be for something they got for free. What's interesting is that people who pay or people who contribute are, on average, nicer to us than the people who don't.
  - js2 9y ago
    > What's interesting is that people who pay or people who contribute are, on average, nicer to us than the people who don't. This should not be at all surprising. It's often mentioned on HN that you get rid of the worst customers by charging more. This is not peculiar to OSS either.
  - redler 9y ago
    It being "free", in a certain sense, makes it invaluable—a blank canvas on which the ungrateful have the opportunity to each paint their own vision of its worth. Something priced at one dollar is worth a buck, but at zero it's priceless, so there's no specific psychological cap on the well of entitlement for a certain kind of unreflective user.
    - dennykane 9y ago
      This is just a poetic, very well thought out comment. Nice syntax, too, with the long dash. The only quibble might be the comma outside of the quotations, but that seems to be more of a regional, stylistic thing than a hard-and-fast rule. Also, it might make more sense for there to be "no specific psychological floor in the well of entitlement" rather than the way it is currently worded. But overall, very, very nice indeed!
  - kartan 9y ago
    > It's the assholes who think I'm gonna put up with their crap for free that most chap my hide, and I suspect OSS is unique in just how entitled people can be for something they got for free. Some people is entitled. Period. They have the same attitude when they pay, when they get something for free, when they are right and when they are wrong. And these people are the ones that ruin it for everyone.
- audleman 9y ago
  This provides some good context. People are used to the model of paying for something and the entitlement that comes with it. It's only natural that they would take that default stance when it comes to OSS.
- ploxiln 9y ago
  I think Caddy brought this on themselves by being so heavily marketed and user friendly. I'll have to clarify right at the top that I have not previously commented about Caddy, and I don't care about one cosmetic header nor the need to compile from source, those sound just fine to me. Anyway: compare https://caddyserver.com/ https://caddyserver.com/ to http://nginx.org/ http://nginx.org/ and on the former you'll see way more marketing, logos, testimonials, quickstarts, etc etc ... looks way more like a product than an open-source free-software tool. I always thought this was a weird trend for open source projects these days. I'm accustomed to debian, gnu make, nginx, apache, samba, cups ... useful tools with zero marketing and support. That's just how it used to work ... and frankly it still seems like it works better that way. A super modern website and easy-as-possible getting started stuff sets the wrong expectations in many many people who are not familiar with this world. They expect to do nothing and get a slick product / solution. They're drawn to the language they're familiar with from startups who get millions in funding and promise the world and then fizzle in a couple of years. That's not sustainable for open source projects. Open source software is very useful and valuable and democratizing. Just the simplification of no per-user or per-machine or per-anything licensing adds a huge amount of value! The economies of scale of good quality open source software is super high. This stuff is really amazing and effective. But the support does not scale. This is the one part you have to pay for with your own time. It could take years and years. That's the trade-off. You can't get it all for free, it's not possible.
  - carussell 9y ago
    > Anyway: compare https://caddyserver.com/ https://caddyserver.com/ to http://nginx.org/ http://nginx.org/ You should probably be comparing to nginx.com.
    - ploxiln 9y ago
      I never visit nginx.com, it might scare me away ... yup, it's total bullshit. I'll concede that Nginx does way more of whatever Caddy did that apparently made people upset. But notice that nginx.org does nothing to attract people looking for a product, while nginx.com is an enterprise product, not a user product. I just take issue with quotes like > I do find it ironic that the open source community is so irate about having to compile software from source to customize it the way they want. while the author does not realize how hard he was working to attract people who are not really the open source community.
- tonyedgecombe 9y ago
  I've found the more people pay the nicer they are, having a really cheap product is an easy way to gain a lot of shitty customers.
  - AndyNemmity 9y ago
    I've found the same situation, the more people pay the nicer they are. The ones that pay nothing are generally the most vile, and demanding.
djsumdog 9y ago
> entitlement People get angry because they have hope for a better world. Now a lot of the responses he talks about in this blog post are, yes, very childish. I can see that. OSS companies do struggle. I get that too. A lot of times they don't think enough about the business model before they start building their product. I agree, support contracts aren't enough a lot of times and I can see how their efforts struggled to bring in revenue. What they did is really no different than what RedHat did with RHEL .. that's why we have CentOS. Today we live in a very different idea of what OSS should be. A lot of people don't differentiate licensees. So much of what is OSS are frameworks and tooling, and even in that space, big companies have worked very hard to get things out of GPL (Clang is a good example...and MacOS which has systematically removed any GPL code over the past several years). So much of our OSS is supported financially by the big players (RedHat, IBM, Google) and the dream of Linux desktops overtaking Windows on the consumer market died a long time ago. But that was the dream: http://penguindreams.org/blog/the-philosophy-of-open-source-in-community-and-enterprise-software/ http://penguindreams.org/blog/the-philosophy-of-open-source-... I don't think it's entitlement. I think a lot of people want to see real OSS; where devs have the time and energy to work together to make really good tooling. We want more projects like DarkTable. We want spare time projects that become amazing that people care about, not more half free/half enterprise stuff. If a company fails to be profitable, we hope their tooling lives on in OSS. Making OSS profitable is super difficult, and something I don't even look for in my own big project (which is used more by students than in the commercial space). And the big reality is, will this actually generate revenue for Caddy? Probably not at all. I'm sure they thought this out, and enough of them thought it was a good idea, but looking at it on the outside in, it was a terrible business decision. I mean, what did they seriously think was going to happen? Would companies seriously start paying a fee for what they had gotten for free previously, when it would cost lest just to add a package building step into existing build systems? Six months out I hope they publish a post on how this affected their actual revenue stream. If it helped them out, then I guess it was worth it to make that decision and I'm totally wrong and I have a lot to learn about business. If not, I'm equally interested in what went wrong and how open source projects can get a revenue model done correctly.
- chriscappuccio 9y ago
  They publish their source code for free and invite you to help if you so choose. What is not "real OSS" here ? "We want"? You are delusional
TAForObvReasons 9y ago
There are perfectly amicable ways of monetizing open source. The most common example is selling a pro version with additional features that go beyond the basic use case. That's a well-understood model and shifts the discussion. Trying to diminish the open offering by adding ads, even if removable, is perceived as taking away something
uiri 9y ago
we charge as little as $6/month, and we still get complaints about price Charge more. Like an order of magnitude more. You should charge enough that people who complain about price are firmly outside of your target market. If the thing is something you can target to large companies, you could charge an additional order of magnitude more.
bartread 9y ago
Sadly the internet is full of bullies, trolls, and those overburdened with a colossal sense of entitlement, and I feel a lot of sympathy for the Caddy maintainers. I endured a similar situation a few years ago. We coped with it, to some extent, with gallows humour by printing the most outrageous comments and sticking them up on a sort of wall of shame. I particularly appreciated the tweet branding us "software terrorists". (Btw, this nonsense is exactly the same mob behaviour Jon Ronson talks about in So, You've Been Publicly Shamed - which I highly recommend).

zbentley 9y ago

I agree with everything you said, but couldn't resist: The awful behaviors you see from some users of a previously free-and-open project that went closed (ish) sound an awful like the behaviors of . . . paying customers in pretty much every industry. https://talesfromawaitress.wordpress.com/ https://talesfromawaitress.wordpress.com/ https://clientsfromhell.net/ https://clientsfromhell.net/

bad_user 9y ago
Except that users of open source are not paying money and most of them aren't contributing or donating anything either. So the least such users can do is to be nice otherwise gtfo.
- js2 9y ago
  You'd think that, but OTOH, they haven't invested anything so they have no incentive to be nice. You and I may wish people were nice as a matter of course, but sadly, not so much. :-( (To be clear, I think the really awful users are a just a very vocal minority.)
  - AndyNemmity 9y ago
    Investing doesn't give an incentive to be nice either.
SwellJoe 9y ago
If they're paying me (or if they're contributing in some way), I'll accept a certain level of belligerence. It's the assholes who think I'm gonna put up with their crap for free that most chap my hide, and I suspect OSS is unique in just how entitled people can be for something they got for free. What's interesting is that people who pay or people who contribute are, on average, nicer to us than the people who don't.
- js2 9y ago
  > What's interesting is that people who pay or people who contribute are, on average, nicer to us than the people who don't. This should not be at all surprising. It's often mentioned on HN that you get rid of the worst customers by charging more. This is not peculiar to OSS either.
- redler 9y ago
  It being "free", in a certain sense, makes it invaluable—a blank canvas on which the ungrateful have the opportunity to each paint their own vision of its worth. Something priced at one dollar is worth a buck, but at zero it's priceless, so there's no specific psychological cap on the well of entitlement for a certain kind of unreflective user.
  - dennykane 9y ago
    This is just a poetic, very well thought out comment. Nice syntax, too, with the long dash. The only quibble might be the comma outside of the quotations, but that seems to be more of a regional, stylistic thing than a hard-and-fast rule. Also, it might make more sense for there to be "no specific psychological floor in the well of entitlement" rather than the way it is currently worded. But overall, very, very nice indeed!
- kartan 9y ago
  > It's the assholes who think I'm gonna put up with their crap for free that most chap my hide, and I suspect OSS is unique in just how entitled people can be for something they got for free. Some people is entitled. Period. They have the same attitude when they pay, when they get something for free, when they are right and when they are wrong. And these people are the ones that ruin it for everyone.
audleman 9y ago
This provides some good context. People are used to the model of paying for something and the entitlement that comes with it. It's only natural that they would take that default stance when it comes to OSS.
ploxiln 9y ago
I think Caddy brought this on themselves by being so heavily marketed and user friendly. I'll have to clarify right at the top that I have not previously commented about Caddy, and I don't care about one cosmetic header nor the need to compile from source, those sound just fine to me. Anyway: compare https://caddyserver.com/ https://caddyserver.com/ to http://nginx.org/ http://nginx.org/ and on the former you'll see way more marketing, logos, testimonials, quickstarts, etc etc ... looks way more like a product than an open-source free-software tool. I always thought this was a weird trend for open source projects these days. I'm accustomed to debian, gnu make, nginx, apache, samba, cups ... useful tools with zero marketing and support. That's just how it used to work ... and frankly it still seems like it works better that way. A super modern website and easy-as-possible getting started stuff sets the wrong expectations in many many people who are not familiar with this world. They expect to do nothing and get a slick product / solution. They're drawn to the language they're familiar with from startups who get millions in funding and promise the world and then fizzle in a couple of years. That's not sustainable for open source projects. Open source software is very useful and valuable and democratizing. Just the simplification of no per-user or per-machine or per-anything licensing adds a huge amount of value! The economies of scale of good quality open source software is super high. This stuff is really amazing and effective. But the support does not scale. This is the one part you have to pay for with your own time. It could take years and years. That's the trade-off. You can't get it all for free, it's not possible.
- carussell 9y ago
  > Anyway: compare https://caddyserver.com/ https://caddyserver.com/ to http://nginx.org/ http://nginx.org/ You should probably be comparing to nginx.com.
  - ploxiln 9y ago
    I never visit nginx.com, it might scare me away ... yup, it's total bullshit. I'll concede that Nginx does way more of whatever Caddy did that apparently made people upset. But notice that nginx.org does nothing to attract people looking for a product, while nginx.com is an enterprise product, not a user product. I just take issue with quotes like > I do find it ironic that the open source community is so irate about having to compile software from source to customize it the way they want. while the author does not realize how hard he was working to attract people who are not really the open source community.
tonyedgecombe 9y ago
I've found the more people pay the nicer they are, having a really cheap product is an easy way to gain a lot of shitty customers.
- AndyNemmity 9y ago
  I've found the same situation, the more people pay the nicer they are. The ones that pay nothing are generally the most vile, and demanding.

djsumdog 9y ago

> entitlement People get angry because they have hope for a better world. Now a lot of the responses he talks about in this blog post are, yes, very childish. I can see that. OSS companies do struggle. I get that too. A lot of times they don't think enough about the business model before they start building their product. I agree, support contracts aren't enough a lot of times and I can see how their efforts struggled to bring in revenue. What they did is really no different than what RedHat did with RHEL .. that's why we have CentOS. Today we live in a very different idea of what OSS should be. A lot of people don't differentiate licensees. So much of what is OSS are frameworks and tooling, and even in that space, big companies have worked very hard to get things out of GPL (Clang is a good example...and MacOS which has systematically removed any GPL code over the past several years). So much of our OSS is supported financially by the big players (RedHat, IBM, Google) and the dream of Linux desktops overtaking Windows on the consumer market died a long time ago. But that was the dream: http://penguindreams.org/blog/the-philosophy-of-open-source-in-community-and-enterprise-software/ http://penguindreams.org/blog/the-philosophy-of-open-source-... I don't think it's entitlement. I think a lot of people want to see real OSS; where devs have the time and energy to work together to make really good tooling. We want more projects like DarkTable. We want spare time projects that become amazing that people care about, not more half free/half enterprise stuff. If a company fails to be profitable, we hope their tooling lives on in OSS. Making OSS profitable is super difficult, and something I don't even look for in my own big project (which is used more by students than in the commercial space). And the big reality is, will this actually generate revenue for Caddy? Probably not at all. I'm sure they thought this out, and enough of them thought it was a good idea, but looking at it on the outside in, it was a terrible business decision. I mean, what did they seriously think was going to happen? Would companies seriously start paying a fee for what they had gotten for free previously, when it would cost lest just to add a package building step into existing build systems? Six months out I hope they publish a post on how this affected their actual revenue stream. If it helped them out, then I guess it was worth it to make that decision and I'm totally wrong and I have a lot to learn about business. If not, I'm equally interested in what went wrong and how open source projects can get a revenue model done correctly.

chriscappuccio 9y ago
They publish their source code for free and invite you to help if you so choose. What is not "real OSS" here ? "We want"? You are delusional

TAForObvReasons 9y ago

There are perfectly amicable ways of monetizing open source. The most common example is selling a pro version with additional features that go beyond the basic use case. That's a well-understood model and shifts the discussion. Trying to diminish the open offering by adding ads, even if removable, is perceived as taking away something

uiri 9y ago

we charge as little as $6/month, and we still get complaints about price Charge more. Like an order of magnitude more. You should charge enough that people who complain about price are firmly outside of your target market. If the thing is something you can target to large companies, you could charge an additional order of magnitude more.

bartread 9y ago

Sadly the internet is full of bullies, trolls, and those overburdened with a colossal sense of entitlement, and I feel a lot of sympathy for the Caddy maintainers. I endured a similar situation a few years ago. We coped with it, to some extent, with gallows humour by printing the most outrageous comments and sticking them up on a sort of wall of shame. I particularly appreciated the tweet branding us "software terrorists". (Btw, this nonsense is exactly the same mob behaviour Jon Ronson talks about in So, You've Been Publicly Shamed - which I highly recommend).