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> ideally communicated from the start if only a minority could grow big and sufficiently high revenue generating to be capable of paying anything, then having

by chii 2y ago

> ideally communicated from the start if only a minority could grow big and sufficiently high revenue generating to be capable of paying anything, then having this concept of "paying back" from the start would've been a chilling effect on the adoption in the first place. wordpress ecosystem is big, but it is the network effect, rather than the software itself. This network effect require lots of individual participants to kick start it at the beginning. Those participants will benefit from the software being free. If it was known at the start, that if you grew to a certain size, you'd have to start paying a royalty of some sort (which is the "community expectation of pay or contribution"), then you may not even start using the software in the first place - or at least, consider alternatives. This makes the ecosystem small. They don't call it bait and switch for nothing. The expectation of contribution will never be transparent from the beginning.

josephg 2y ago
> If it was known at the start, that if you grew to a certain size, you'd have to start paying a royalty of some sort (which is the "community expectation of pay or contribution"), then you may not even start using the software in the first place - or at least, consider alternatives. Maybe! But you could say the same thing about every paid service. “Oh, if Netflix charges customers money every month they won’t grow as fast and might never be financially profitable!”. The answer isn’t to remain free forever. It’s to accept the trade off. And it’s gotta line up with the license too. I’d be happy if the policy was “look, if you’re doing >1M monthly revenue, we expect your company to fund some people full time to work on opensource contributions. (With some specified minimum revenue / developer ratio). After all, your business depends on this free software but software isn’t free to make. If you don’t want to do that, that’s fine - but you’re getting rich off our voluntary labor without giving back in turn. It’s an opensource licence. You’re legally welcome to do that. But know that so long as you do that you aren’t welcome at conferences or community events or spaces since you’ve opted yourself our community of contributors.

by chii 2y ago

josephg 2y ago

> If it was known at the start, that if you grew to a certain size, you'd have to start paying a royalty of some sort (which is the "community expectation of pay or contribution"), then you may not even start using the software in the first place - or at least, consider alternatives. Maybe! But you could say the same thing about every paid service. “Oh, if Netflix charges customers money every month they won’t grow as fast and might never be financially profitable!”. The answer isn’t to remain free forever. It’s to accept the trade off. And it’s gotta line up with the license too. I’d be happy if the policy was “look, if you’re doing >1M monthly revenue, we expect your company to fund some people full time to work on opensource contributions. (With some specified minimum revenue / developer ratio). After all, your business depends on this free software but software isn’t free to make. If you don’t want to do that, that’s fine - but you’re getting rich off our voluntary labor without giving back in turn. It’s an opensource licence. You’re legally welcome to do that. But know that so long as you do that you aren’t welcome at conferences or community events or spaces since you’ve opted yourself our community of contributors.