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Very well said. I maintain an open source project which is used by a few hundred companies, and I also sell a couple commercial products which enhance the func

Very well said. I maintain an open source project which is used by a few hundred companies, and I also sell a couple commercial products which enhance the functionality. I don't accept donations since I much prefer to offer well-defined commercial products instead of ill-defined donation benefits. Despite this, I've still had users who insist I should accept donations, often claiming that I would make some absurdly unrealistic amount of money if I did so. In one case the user kept arguing with me and demanding to know more reasoning as to why I didn't want to accept his donation. Of course these same users are absolutely not interested in the well-defined paid products and always offer weird mental gymnastics as to their thinking. I just can't relate to or understand this behavior. Do these people burst into random businesses in real life and say "Hello, I love your store but don't want to buy any of your products! I demand to know why don't you have a GoFundMe?"

pcthrowaway 5y ago
I understand why you structure things the way you do, but I can speak for myself in a hypothetical scenario where I had money (now) to donate to an open source project that offers paid features. I might be concerned about paying for the paid features, because if I become reliant on them and then my capability to pay for them changes in the future, I'm now in an unfortunate position of having to re-write the features I've grown dependent on, or rewriting other parts of my codebase to remove the reliance on those features (a big refactor later can be more costly than planning properly in the first place) I might then prefer to just use the open source version, and donate when I can, to avoid accidentally becoming dependent on something that I'm not confident of my ability to afford later.
- evanelias 5y ago
  That's a good point, and I can somewhat understand that perspective for some types of software, especially projects geared at individual developers or very small companies. For infrastructure tools that are typically adopted by an entire org or company though (as my products are), the situation is less understandable to me, even in the scenario where the user is a small bootstrapped company or solo dev. I mean, my own company is small and bootstrapped, and I still pay for a number of commercial products because they provide benefit to my business or my own productivity. If I ever can't afford them in the future, that would probably indicate there are deeper existential problems with my business besides needing to rewrite some code to avoid use of those commercial products :) Also, personally if I wanted to give money to open source software but was unsure about the future affordability of doing so, I would especially focus on donating to open source projects that are actively soliciting donations in the first place -- rather than arguing with a business owner over their lack of interest in donations, which is what some users have done in my case.

pcthrowaway 5y ago

I understand why you structure things the way you do, but I can speak for myself in a hypothetical scenario where I had money (now) to donate to an open source project that offers paid features. I might be concerned about paying for the paid features, because if I become reliant on them and then my capability to pay for them changes in the future, I'm now in an unfortunate position of having to re-write the features I've grown dependent on, or rewriting other parts of my codebase to remove the reliance on those features (a big refactor later can be more costly than planning properly in the first place) I might then prefer to just use the open source version, and donate when I can, to avoid accidentally becoming dependent on something that I'm not confident of my ability to afford later.

evanelias 5y ago
That's a good point, and I can somewhat understand that perspective for some types of software, especially projects geared at individual developers or very small companies. For infrastructure tools that are typically adopted by an entire org or company though (as my products are), the situation is less understandable to me, even in the scenario where the user is a small bootstrapped company or solo dev. I mean, my own company is small and bootstrapped, and I still pay for a number of commercial products because they provide benefit to my business or my own productivity. If I ever can't afford them in the future, that would probably indicate there are deeper existential problems with my business besides needing to rewrite some code to avoid use of those commercial products :) Also, personally if I wanted to give money to open source software but was unsure about the future affordability of doing so, I would especially focus on donating to open source projects that are actively soliciting donations in the first place -- rather than arguing with a business owner over their lack of interest in donations, which is what some users have done in my case.