81–90 of 228 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Something like this could work, but I worry that it would create competitiveness and animosity among users.
This is the point of having a seperate buisness license. Sell to big companies along with support.
>If you’re the leader of one of these projects, charge an annual fee for community membership. Open source, closed community. The message to users should be “do whatever you want with the code, but pay us for our time if you want to influence the project’s future.” Lock non-paying users out of the forum and issue tracker, and ignore their emails. People who don’t pay should feel like they are missing out on the party…
> This sounds like a great way to lose all your real contributors. The article mentions "get paid for your time" over and over again, yet who is paying me for the time to write the code for the PR? You expect me to both dedicate my time to writing the code for a PR, and then pay you for the privilege. It certainly sounds absurd on the face of it. On the other hand, I can think of at least three cases where I'd do the…
>If you’re the leader of one of these projects, charge an annual fee for community membership. Open source, closed community. The message to users should be “do whatever you want with the code, but pay us for our time if you want to influence the project’s future.” Lock non-paying users out of the forum and issue tracker, and ignore their emails. People who don’t pay should feel like they are missing out on the party…
You are not obligated to send PRs. You can fork and let it sit there.
Regarding community management, past a certain scale you should charge for it. People often feel entitled and will waste your time instead of reading doc. Majority of OSS projects rely on a handlful of individuals; often 1 or 2 people handling everything.
I completely understand the spirit of this.
OSS is not charity or altruism. Share your code out of self interest (e.g contributions, forks, bug detection etc.) If you get nothing out of it, unsubscribe from notifications.
You don't owe people your time, skills, energy.
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I completely agree, the only thing I still like to keep to myself (or to a very select group) is the ability to cut a release. If you want commit access, just ask. But I still want to validate releases that get pushed out to a bunch of people.
My policy is to never ask, and to only accept if I think I can be worthy of the work at the time (so I might accept at a later date if I feel I don't have the bandwidth today).
I think what open source needs is some very deliberate price discrimination. Have the license be free to the vast majority of users, and cost money for large corporations that can damn well afford it. Not, like, large amounts of money, just something vaguely close to the all-in cost of one full time developer. Basically, "BSD, unless you're a $1B+ valued company that is not paying our software foundation $10k/mo".
It allowed students, hobbyists and freelancers to use the software for free, for any purpose, but companies, institutions and governments had to pay to play.
This idea does not seem to translate in an obvious way to software released under an open source license.
>If you’re the leader of one of these projects, charge an annual fee for community membership. Open source, closed community. The message to users should be “do whatever you want with the code, but pay us for our time if you want to influence the project’s future.” Lock non-paying users out of the forum and issue tracker, and ignore their emails. People who don’t pay should feel like they are missing out on the party…
> You expect me to both dedicate my time to writing the code for a PR, and then pay you for the privilege. No, better yet it would eliminate PRs from entitled users who think this way — who believe they contribute value by writing up issues and submitting minor pull requests that address their own needs, while remaining blind to the far greater value they receive from the project’s much larger code base; the mammoth…
I always wonder where coders find the time to significantly contribute to Opensouce projects - which many seem to do - after their day job, having played and eaten with their kids, and were an attentful husband.
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And so should "open-source code is utility software". Stallman was right when he said that the Open Source movement would eventually abandon any conceptions of software freedom - it seems to me that we now have a whole generation of "open source" contributors for whom the only type of freedom that matters is the freedom of downstream developers, rather than users, and who seem to think that the role of open source in…
I maintain both types of open source projects. I, for one, am happy that we are trending towards more so-called "developer freedom" in open source. I never actually abandoned the concept of "software freedom" as defined by Stallman because I never bought into it in the first place.
I'm hoping that was just an off-handed line that didn't get much thought before being added to the post.
And then they realize that the amount of people/companies even willing to pay at all is a tiny fraction of 1% of their potential target market.
The better advice is to do what you want, know your limits, consider sharing some maintainance responsibility with another committer or two, and don't ever feel obligated to do anything with other people's issues and PRs. It's nice to do, but if it's interfering with anything else, or taking away valuable time, ignore them or just blanket close them, with a note that it's not something you'd be interested in maintaining.
The great thing about open source is someone can fork your code and do what they need. You have no obligation to help them, it's just nice if you can. And if they don't get that, that's not your problem.