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I think like you. But also, one does not necessarily know beforehand that they will want to make money. Like a project could be born out of pure generosity, bu
by j1elo 3y ago
I think like you. But also, one does not necessarily know beforehand that they will want to make money.
Like a project could be born out of pure generosity, but after the happy initial phase the project might get too heavy on the maintenance requirements, causing the author to approach burnout, and possibly deciding that they want to make money to continue pulling the cart forward.
However, here's something I do think: if you create something as Open Source, it should be out of a mentality of goodwill and for the greater good, regardless of how it ends up being used. OSS licenses do mean this with their terms. If you later get tired or burned out, you should just retire and allow the community to keep taking care of it. Just like it happened with the Jq tool [1].
[1]: https://github.com/jqlang/jq/releases/tag/jq-1.7 https://github.com/jqlang/jq/releases/tag/jq-1.7
- Vegenoid 3y agoIf there is a community that is interested in taking care of it, can they not fork it? It seems better for the primary maintainer to continue working on it if people are willing to pay for it, than to stop working on it entirely.
- Winse 3y agoThis is why pure communism is always a steaming pile as well. Who is going to fork it and feed and care for it? Sometimes projects succeed in the same way that road work eventually coalesces when a community needs a road, but many projects don't fit this mold and do much better with the drug dealer style of free for your first hit, then we charge you. Otherwise who is going to produce the stuff out of the wish to see a community do well without any benefit?
- j1elo 3y agoYes, but only a small subset of OSS projects reach the tipping point of having a large enough developer community with people willing to taking care of it. They are the most popular ones, so we tend to hear their names, as opposed to the other majority of projects which have users, but no devs that could take the lead. But of course, OSS ought to be, as I mentioned, a contribution to the greater good. If there are enough people interested in keeping something alive, they should be allowed to do so.