5 ms·

100%. This new trend of maintaining or starting an open source project and then getting upset when people don't send you money is seriously weird. If you want c

100%. This new trend of maintaining or starting an open source project and then getting upset when people don't send you money is seriously weird. If you want compensation, start a company, otherwise consider anything you receive a gift.

mardifoufs 2y ago
Yeah, though I have sympathies for single devs or projects like perl that are obviously non profit. Like, I get the frustrations for actual volunteers and people who survive on building OSS at a small scale. What really annoys me is when someone decides to build a corporation around an open source project, and then you get the usual blog post around users not paying or OSS not being sustainable. Yes, using OSS as your marketing and adoption strategy is probably not very reliable and can cause users to use your OSS as if it was OSS, that is, without giving anything back. But usually those projects succeed because they are OSS, and would've had basically no users otherwise. Who would've used MongoDB, elastic search, or redis if they were proprietary and required a paid license from the get go? In a way, that's also true in this case (success came from being OSS) but again, I get why it seems unfair for some when it's a non profit not being able to sustain itself or get contributions for corporate users.
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  The problem is, if their software had cost what it needed to from the start then that would've put it in a totally different competition with other companies. Bypassing that competition doesn't mean they can suddenly start complaining about how many customers they have vs how much they get.
  - mardifoufs 2y ago
    Yeah I completely agree and that's exactly why the most annoying part of the OSS sustainability conversation. Most of the big OSS players (not individual devs, I'm referring more to the open core type of corporations) would just not exist at all, much less make more money, without OSS. No matter how much money elastic search lost to Amazon for example, they would've made basically nothing without OSS.
graemep 2y ago
You can also do things like dual licensing. GPL or Affero GPL plus proprietary license. Of course this puts off outside contributors so not if you want a "bazaar" development mode—but people complaining about this are usually not doing so.
- sneak 2y ago
  First off, the AGPL license is nonfree (and also nonsensical, it is a EULA pretending to be a license), but more importantly, dual licensing means that you don’t actually believe in software freedoms. If you think users have basic and fundamental rights to the software that they run on their computer, you would never release software under proprietary licenses. It’s like Microsoft’s VS Code nonsense where all the important bits are non free, or any company with “open core”. They don’t care about software freedoms; it’s just open source cosplay.
  - raiph 2y ago
    > dual licensing means that you don’t actually believe in software freedoms If both licenses are accepted by essentially everyone as inherently fully free software licenses, and they don't contradict each other, then what's not to like? Consider the appropriate example here, which isn't anything to do with AGPL (which many people do NOT accept as a free software license), but rather the AL2 / GPL pairing which was the evolution of the original pairing created by the inventor of dual licensing (Larry Wall). What's your beef with Artistic License 2.0 / GPL dual licensing?
- bigiain 2y ago
  Perl might have been the original dual license. GPL or Perl Artistic license. I remember learning about Affero at a Perl Conference in the late 90's or so.
pjmlp 2y ago
The problem, for some, is that they believed the dream it is possible to make a living out of free software. They forgot to read the footnote on how it actually works in capitalist and money driven societies.
- sneak 2y ago
  I make a good living only writing public domain software. Most of it is never published to the web.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    I wonder how it plays out in money that comes in, and money that goes into the authors of the public domain tools that get used, and make this all possible.
  - lelele 2y ago
    What do you mean? Would you please elaborate on that?

mardifoufs 2y ago

Yeah, though I have sympathies for single devs or projects like perl that are obviously non profit. Like, I get the frustrations for actual volunteers and people who survive on building OSS at a small scale. What really annoys me is when someone decides to build a corporation around an open source project, and then you get the usual blog post around users not paying or OSS not being sustainable. Yes, using OSS as your marketing and adoption strategy is probably not very reliable and can cause users to use your OSS as if it was OSS, that is, without giving anything back. But usually those projects succeed because they are OSS, and would've had basically no users otherwise. Who would've used MongoDB, elastic search, or redis if they were proprietary and required a paid license from the get go? In a way, that's also true in this case (success came from being OSS) but again, I get why it seems unfair for some when it's a non profit not being able to sustain itself or get contributions for corporate users.

robertlagrant 2y ago
The problem is, if their software had cost what it needed to from the start then that would've put it in a totally different competition with other companies. Bypassing that competition doesn't mean they can suddenly start complaining about how many customers they have vs how much they get.
- mardifoufs 2y ago
  Yeah I completely agree and that's exactly why the most annoying part of the OSS sustainability conversation. Most of the big OSS players (not individual devs, I'm referring more to the open core type of corporations) would just not exist at all, much less make more money, without OSS. No matter how much money elastic search lost to Amazon for example, they would've made basically nothing without OSS.

graemep 2y ago

You can also do things like dual licensing. GPL or Affero GPL plus proprietary license. Of course this puts off outside contributors so not if you want a "bazaar" development mode—but people complaining about this are usually not doing so.

sneak 2y ago
First off, the AGPL license is nonfree (and also nonsensical, it is a EULA pretending to be a license), but more importantly, dual licensing means that you don’t actually believe in software freedoms. If you think users have basic and fundamental rights to the software that they run on their computer, you would never release software under proprietary licenses. It’s like Microsoft’s VS Code nonsense where all the important bits are non free, or any company with “open core”. They don’t care about software freedoms; it’s just open source cosplay.
- raiph 2y ago
  > dual licensing means that you don’t actually believe in software freedoms If both licenses are accepted by essentially everyone as inherently fully free software licenses, and they don't contradict each other, then what's not to like? Consider the appropriate example here, which isn't anything to do with AGPL (which many people do NOT accept as a free software license), but rather the AL2 / GPL pairing which was the evolution of the original pairing created by the inventor of dual licensing (Larry Wall). What's your beef with Artistic License 2.0 / GPL dual licensing?
bigiain 2y ago
Perl might have been the original dual license. GPL or Perl Artistic license. I remember learning about Affero at a Perl Conference in the late 90's or so.

pjmlp 2y ago

The problem, for some, is that they believed the dream it is possible to make a living out of free software. They forgot to read the footnote on how it actually works in capitalist and money driven societies.

sneak 2y ago
I make a good living only writing public domain software. Most of it is never published to the web.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  I wonder how it plays out in money that comes in, and money that goes into the authors of the public domain tools that get used, and make this all possible.
- lelele 2y ago
  What do you mean? Would you please elaborate on that?