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> In more situations than not, the paying company would then ask for and prefer that I maintain all copyrights for all the changes and that I not make it public

> In more situations than not, the paying company would then ask for and prefer that I maintain all copyrights for all the changes and that I not make it publicly noticeable that this was in fact paid for by this company. For the casual outsider, it appears as if I just had a period of extra motivation and energy and one fine day delivered this feature. > Why companies would not want to use their sponsoring an Open Source project for marketing purposes and good will always baffle me. I have heard it explained by things like that the company does not want their competitors to so obviously spot that they use this project, but that seems like an odd and weak argument. Thoughts? My guess is because if it becomes known they will pay for feature requests on open source, they might worry other open source projects will ask for money for features they would have added for "free" otherwise.

taytus 4y ago
Or maybe it is a way to hide a weak or extremely busy engineering team and they prefer to delegate the tasks.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
Basically this. Once you establish a track record of paying for things, you will be expected to pay for everything. It’s not only feature requests. I’ve filed bug reports on open source projects complete with example reproduction cases and summaries of my debug knowledge, only to have the maintainers demand money for it. In the last case, the bug was a show-stopper that led us to switch to a different library, but I thought I’d do them a favor and share my knowledge as we switched. The response was a snarky reply about how we need to hire and pay them if we want it fixed (even though we didn’t need it any more). Lately I’ll just submit big reports from my personal email/account to avoid this whole back and forth.
- jrochkind1 4y ago
  Hm. Open source is really not thriving.

taytus 4y ago

Or maybe it is a way to hide a weak or extremely busy engineering team and they prefer to delegate the tasks.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

Basically this. Once you establish a track record of paying for things, you will be expected to pay for everything. It’s not only feature requests. I’ve filed bug reports on open source projects complete with example reproduction cases and summaries of my debug knowledge, only to have the maintainers demand money for it. In the last case, the bug was a show-stopper that led us to switch to a different library, but I thought I’d do them a favor and share my knowledge as we switched. The response was a snarky reply about how we need to hire and pay them if we want it fixed (even though we didn’t need it any more). Lately I’ll just submit big reports from my personal email/account to avoid this whole back and forth.

jrochkind1 4y ago
Hm. Open source is really not thriving.