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I once heavily relied on a project called Prisma. Our business depended on it as did others. Then suddenly one day they have decided to completely remove a few

I once heavily relied on a project called Prisma. Our business depended on it as did others. Then suddenly one day they have decided to completely remove a few crucial feature without much warning and release a version 2, without giving any sort of alternative to those great features. They stopped support for prisma 1, deprecated the packages, changed whole codebase and links, features and so on. It was open source project but at a very large scale where their change impacted thousands of businesses. A lot of people wanted to sponsor or support ongoing development of prisma 1 until the similar functionalities have been developed on prisma 2. But their repo, their rules, their business decisions. Which I respect. Nothing to do there, except accepting and moving on and creating alternative solutions. It was devastating for me personally. Took me half a year to refactor a lot of code in a lot of different projects that were purely business logic dependent on prisma 1. And I couldn’t do anything as a solo dev at that point. What could I do? I waited and created alternative solutions until we get official ones. ... I still use prisma. Its a great piece of tool, backed by a the awesome community and team. They are doing wonders. But the incident taught me a different reality of open sourced projects. I tried to connect that case with the post and thinking back, I think you are right, and at same time, you could ask for sponsorship for your time, or share your situation instead. People have expectations. Its what keeps them connected and growing.

MiddleEndian 3y ago
>But their repo, their rules, their business decisions Was it not BSD or GPL or some similar license? If so someone could just fork it while ignoring their rules and business decisions (as long as at least one other person had the code I guess).
- andkenneth 3y ago
  It's apache
- vegetablepotpie 3y ago
  Not OP, but looking at the products GitHub, Prisma uses an Apache license. Regardless, I don’t think whether the ability to clone and own is the issue, rather the question is: do you want to take on the scope of maintaining a library or other piece of software that’s not at the core of your business? Maybe you’re a developer who can keep account of multiple layers, or all layers in your stack. If so that’s great. But we’re all limited to varying degrees and there’s only so much one can do. Really, you need to find reliable partners who can own some of that complexity for you. In OPs case, they picked a partner that was not reliable. They paid for it with more maintenance. But this is what you get with open source. You can get it for free and you can set it up fast because you don’t need to negotiate contracts, but your dependencies are under no obligation to support your use cases.
  - MiddleEndian 3y ago
    I guess my interpretation of "A lot of people wanted to sponsor or support ongoing development of prisma 1 until the similar functionalities have been developed on prisma 2." was that they had some sort of team potentially ready to go, but perhaps they were stopped by an "open source" license that wasn't a "free license" or whatever. But yeah I get it, too much of a pain, too unrealistic, etc. Of course, open source software is not the only thing at risk of this, seems like most modern software gives you little control over what version you use.

MiddleEndian 3y ago

>But their repo, their rules, their business decisions Was it not BSD or GPL or some similar license? If so someone could just fork it while ignoring their rules and business decisions (as long as at least one other person had the code I guess).

andkenneth 3y ago
It's apache
vegetablepotpie 3y ago
Not OP, but looking at the products GitHub, Prisma uses an Apache license. Regardless, I don’t think whether the ability to clone and own is the issue, rather the question is: do you want to take on the scope of maintaining a library or other piece of software that’s not at the core of your business? Maybe you’re a developer who can keep account of multiple layers, or all layers in your stack. If so that’s great. But we’re all limited to varying degrees and there’s only so much one can do. Really, you need to find reliable partners who can own some of that complexity for you. In OPs case, they picked a partner that was not reliable. They paid for it with more maintenance. But this is what you get with open source. You can get it for free and you can set it up fast because you don’t need to negotiate contracts, but your dependencies are under no obligation to support your use cases.
- MiddleEndian 3y ago
  I guess my interpretation of "A lot of people wanted to sponsor or support ongoing development of prisma 1 until the similar functionalities have been developed on prisma 2." was that they had some sort of team potentially ready to go, but perhaps they were stopped by an "open source" license that wasn't a "free license" or whatever. But yeah I get it, too much of a pain, too unrealistic, etc. Of course, open source software is not the only thing at risk of this, seems like most modern software gives you little control over what version you use.