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Having worked at an org with $xxMM in revenue, we still wouldn’t have paid for it. We would have chosen to find a different tool. It’s a Git UI. Come on.
For open-source projects driven mainly by one contributor, I think the model employed by Sidekiq[1] is better than this one. There is a base version with the MIT (or similar) license. Then there is a PRO version which adds some enterprise functionality + premium support. But still a good thing that Ungit is trying this. There is value in experimentation! [1] https://github.com/mperham/sidekiq
I've always wondered, in such cases where you have an open core and plan to monetize on extra features and plugins; what do you do if the community just goes ahead and adds those extra features? Or someone forks the project and adds the features?
It's likely the maintainer is in the best position to start a company about the product to deliver more features faster and at higher quality along with more inherent trust.
1) I think this is going to be a trend in the future, for two main reasons, one is that the cloud poses very challenging limits to individuals or small companies to monetize they OSS projects selling services, the second is that many OSS developers are starting to think that it's a bit unfair that incredibly successful companies sold for billions, mostly based on OSS frameworks, libraries, operating systems, don't support the projects they used to reach to such success. And no... releasing your own OSS project to the public, developed for internal interests, is not going to pay back the authors of the projects used to reach the success.
2) If you like this route, better to start ASAP with such a license, or at least start with some restrictive *GPL license and not BSD. Otherwise you are obviously susceptible to forking once you insert such a clause.
While I can understand where he is coming from, his stuff is itself largely built on the free licensed software of others. In the end, this seems to me like pulling up the ladder after himself, and ultimately quite selfish.
How is making a living from your work selfish?
Taking advantage of the community and not contributing back for others to benefit (as you have, for free) seems selfish to me.
Maybe if he proportionately (based on LOC or something) donated any income to his upstream dependencies?
...but I suspect that wouldn’t leave much.
If this becomes a trend I'm afraid it will hurt business use of all open source software, since companies will never know if their dependencies are going to suddenly start charging money. Even though you can use the old versions, getting stuck on outdated libraries is a big problem for a lot of projects, where you try to stay up-to-date. It feels like we are only recently at a point where managers and lawyers will pe…
Well, it's not "free today and $90/mo tomorrow", it's just that they're not going to maintain the one that's under the free license. You don't suddenly have to pay $90/mo for what was already distributed.
It's a fair attempt to make some money, but this license is odious and bizarre. I don't think there's a trend for this.
Reinventing GPL with less care. I can copy the code, re-license as plain-MIT, and now commercial companies can use it for free. A dual GPL-commercial license is the correct way to handle this. A more useful contribution to the license landscape would be to define a commercial sibling-license to the GPL that described how license payments would be disbursed.
I decided to go the GPL route, but am not currently accepting contributions. I've managed to successfully license the code under a companion license, which is doable since I'm the only copyright holder.
My thoughts are that there should be a contrib fork for major contributions that authors wish to maintain copyright over, but for minor contributions/bug fixes the author probably doesn't care and it would be better for everyone if the contribution was integrated into the core repository.
Speaking on his pricing, $90/month is more expensive by far than IntelliJ Ultimate/PHPStorm/RubyMine by far with a lot less value. Having worked at an org with $xxMM in revenue, we still wouldn’t have paid for it. We would have chosen to find a different tool. It’s a Git UI. Come on.
Reinventing GPL with less care. I can copy the code, re-license as plain-MIT, and now commercial companies can use it for free. A dual GPL-commercial license is the correct way to handle this. A more useful contribution to the license landscape would be to define a commercial sibling-license to the GPL that described how license payments would be disbursed.
You can't relicense someone elses code. You dont have the right to do that.
If you fork this code, only your changes would be under MIT. So you would have a mixed-license project, and users would need to comply with both licenses.
If you don't want to use this license, you have to fork it from before the license change... giving up the changes that were made after the new license takes effect.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is making a living from your work selfish?
It depends, is that work based on the free work of others? Taking advantage of the community and not contributing back for others to benefit (as you have, for free) seems selfish to me. Maybe if he proportionately (based on LOC or something) donated any income to his upstream dependencies? ...but I suspect that wouldn’t leave much.
The "You can't say it is open-source" bullshit is just the first in a long line of idiots lining up to comment on it.
Who are these people who so desperately want to share with the Internet that they cannot say anything which is remotely correct?