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When you've had thousands of hours of free external contributions to the ecosystem, where is the actual ownership? Is it still "your project"? And if so, to wha
by fishnchips 3y ago
When you've had thousands of hours of free external contributions to the ecosystem, where is the actual ownership? Is it still "your project"? And if so, to what extent? What are your obligations to the community members and/or external contributors?
On the monetization question - do you need to give others the opportunity to give money back? If so, who should assess the size and "adequacy" of these contributions? If you don't provide the opportunity for others to sponsor the project, does it change your rights and obligations?
These are not easy questions, and now our entire industry is trying to work out the answers. OP's is one voice in this discussion, and an important one given GitLab's prominence and the fact that they took a different path, which seems to be working well for them.
It's also a way more complex problem for software like Terraform that explicitly depends on the work of others for its core functionality than for something that works perfectly fine standalone, like Hashi's Vault, or indeed GitLab itself.