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There is a huge cost. Maintainers have major time commitments, and we hear jobs looking for people's OSS contributions. Which is cool and all until you realize

There is a huge cost. Maintainers have major time commitments, and we hear jobs looking for people's OSS contributions. Which is cool and all until you realize that some people work at Facebook on React and get to publish to OSS as their day job, and some people like myself have kids and a proprietary software job. So I fully support companies offering their software free, except to run commercially. To note, about 8 years ago I saw many companies and people open sourcing interesting software. This was for personal gains... They were a consulting company. ThoughtBot was a good example, they made tools, they made blogs about ruby on rails, they also sold their professional services. And it worked.

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suls 8y ago
Did you mean ThoughtWorks?
- papa_bear 8y ago
  I had heard of ThoughtBot, but not ThoughtWorks. Seems like both are relevant examples: https://github.com/thoughtbot https://github.com/thoughtbot https://github.com/thoughtworks https://github.com/thoughtworks
  - gbraad 8y ago
    ThoughtWorks and ThoughtBot are different companies, of which TW is well-known due to Martin Fowler, the many debates about the relevance of TDD, agile practices, etc, and they have offices all over the world. They started work on tools, like CruiseControl, and open sourced this. To me it never felt like they made tools open source first, but rather a need that came to have them stay relevant as other, often times better Open Source-first tools came around. The same happened with GoCD. ThoughtBot came around later, and feels much like a adhering to a lot of the similar cultural habits. Note: I worked for TW, currently at Red Hat. Note 2: Somne of TW's projects under the other pillars are open source first, but aren't related to this topic.
svnpenn 8y ago
interesting what license would you even use for that - it seems everything here allows commercial https://choosealicense.com/appendix https://choosealicense.com/appendix
- witten 8y ago
  Here's one: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
  - sudhirj 8y ago
    Aren’t Creaive Commons licenses not suitable for code? Can’t find a reference but they seemed pretty clear about that.
    - mch82 8y ago
      Correct, Creative Commons recommends using alternate licenses for code. See “Can I apply a Creative Commons license to software?”, https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-commons-license-to-software https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-comm... Creative Commons licenses are good for documentation and manuals.
    - witten 8y ago
      You are correct. And yet I've found multiple cases in which they're used for code.
- captainbland 8y ago
  I guess the Fair Source License should fit in there: https://fair.io/#license https://fair.io/#license This is basically "you're free to use the application and the source unless you're a company where 25 people or more will be using/modifying this software". Mind you, I see an issue with this where proving that the number of people are actually using the software is difficult. I'd prefer a version where it's just the number of people in the organisation in total.
hw 8y ago
Totally agree. Sometimes you just have to pay the bills. There are some projects that are extremely well done OSS but also have an 'Enterprise' side to them that's paid and offers more advanced features normally required by commercial entities: 1. Sidekiq (https://github.com/mperham/sidekiq https://github.com/mperham/sidekiq) 2. Couchbase (https://www.couchbase.com https://www.couchbase.com)

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suls 8y ago

Did you mean ThoughtWorks?

papa_bear 8y ago
I had heard of ThoughtBot, but not ThoughtWorks. Seems like both are relevant examples: https://github.com/thoughtbot https://github.com/thoughtbot https://github.com/thoughtworks https://github.com/thoughtworks
- gbraad 8y ago
  ThoughtWorks and ThoughtBot are different companies, of which TW is well-known due to Martin Fowler, the many debates about the relevance of TDD, agile practices, etc, and they have offices all over the world. They started work on tools, like CruiseControl, and open sourced this. To me it never felt like they made tools open source first, but rather a need that came to have them stay relevant as other, often times better Open Source-first tools came around. The same happened with GoCD. ThoughtBot came around later, and feels much like a adhering to a lot of the similar cultural habits. Note: I worked for TW, currently at Red Hat. Note 2: Somne of TW's projects under the other pillars are open source first, but aren't related to this topic.

svnpenn 8y ago

interesting what license would you even use for that - it seems everything here allows commercial https://choosealicense.com/appendix https://choosealicense.com/appendix

witten 8y ago
Here's one: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
- sudhirj 8y ago
  Aren’t Creaive Commons licenses not suitable for code? Can’t find a reference but they seemed pretty clear about that.
  - mch82 8y ago
    Correct, Creative Commons recommends using alternate licenses for code. See “Can I apply a Creative Commons license to software?”, https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-commons-license-to-software https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-comm... Creative Commons licenses are good for documentation and manuals.
  - witten 8y ago
    You are correct. And yet I've found multiple cases in which they're used for code.
captainbland 8y ago
I guess the Fair Source License should fit in there: https://fair.io/#license https://fair.io/#license This is basically "you're free to use the application and the source unless you're a company where 25 people or more will be using/modifying this software". Mind you, I see an issue with this where proving that the number of people are actually using the software is difficult. I'd prefer a version where it's just the number of people in the organisation in total.

hw 8y ago

Totally agree. Sometimes you just have to pay the bills. There are some projects that are extremely well done OSS but also have an 'Enterprise' side to them that's paid and offers more advanced features normally required by commercial entities: 1. Sidekiq (https://github.com/mperham/sidekiq https://github.com/mperham/sidekiq) 2. Couchbase (https://www.couchbase.com https://www.couchbase.com)