Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Open Source Maintenance Fee

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 260 posts

Re: Open Source Maintenance Fee

#101

Post by robmensching »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #97
trjordan wrote: post #31

I love the innovation. The basic idea here appears to be: - Nobody wants this to be closed source. The code is freely available, and you may do with it as you want. The marginal cost to distribute the code is 0, after all. - The maintainers, as people, don't want to do charity work for companies. Their time is limited, and if they're going to support revenue-generating activities, they want a cut of the revenue. So e…

It is a tough thing. I want to focus on the negatives from two perspectives, as you wrote some positive: * This can make it harder to recruit further contributors as there is a two-clays system of contributors. Paid and unpaid. "Why should I fix a bug for free, while others earn the money?" * Accepting money make sit a business transaction, if I accept somebody's money they have demands towards me. Then I got to work…

> This can make it harder to recruit further contributors as there is a two-clays system of contributors.

We'll see. I haven't seen any reduction in contributions (not that the project gets lots of contributions because we're the same as every other Open Source project, most consumers just consume). Also, note that the fee is just for maintenance. I've seen near 0% contribution rate for all Open Source projects to "maintenance chores". Those just don't fall into the "scratch your own itch" class of problems.

> Accepting money make sit a business transaction, if I accept somebody's money they have demands towards me. Then I got to work on it.

True, but I've been committed to my project for over 25 years and I want to continue to improve the project. The fee has really helped keep that motivation up (aka: sustainable). The reaction has been mostly positive which is also a plus. :)

> But of course the volunteer free model has sustainability issues ...

Agreed. I think the OSMF is a good way to tackle exactly that issue.

Re: Open Source Maintenance Fee

#102

Post by 20k »

chrisandchris wrote: post #90
jerleth wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst part for me is: > Q: How long do I have to pay the fee? > You pay the Maintenance Fee as long as you use the project. What does that even mean? I built one-off apps for small businesses that I never touch again or maybe every 5 years. Okay, at least paying perpetually for something I don't use anymore is out of question but if I open a solution for a fix I have to check all 80 packages what their current li…

> For me that's basically a subscription fee for one-time download. Not a WiX user, but that's my issue with it too. E.g., AutoMapper, a popular mapping library for .Net recently changed their license from Free to a Subscription. We use it heavily, and may be willing to pay - however: we are still using the same version as of 2 years ago, because there are no new features we care about and there's no need to put in m…

The problem is, if its one time payment, companies will just leech off of it indefinitely. It'd be great if companies were contributing, but its gotten to the point where you have to assume heavy bad faith from everyone involved

Re: Open Source Maintenance Fee

#103

Post by robmensching »

orochimaaru wrote: post #49
trjordan wrote: post #31

I love the innovation. The basic idea here appears to be: - Nobody wants this to be closed source. The code is freely available, and you may do with it as you want. The marginal cost to distribute the code is 0, after all. - The maintainers, as people, don't want to do charity work for companies. Their time is limited, and if they're going to support revenue-generating activities, they want a cut of the revenue. So e…

I have mixed feelings about this. I’m not a Wix user so this is a general comment on the substance of this. As an open source project no one is forcing you to maintain it. Every fix you put in is something that you do of your own volition. No company can force you to accept a PR or work on it. I think FOSS developers often get stressed about this but unless you personally have financial motivations around what you’ve…

> As an open source project no one is forcing you to maintain it.

Absolutely true. For maintainers willing to abandon their project because they tire of maintaining it, this is a totally viable alternative. Just ignore everything you don't want to do.

However, the maintainers I know care deeply about their project and making it useful. However, when their project becomes successful, the scales tip, and maintenance becomes a real burden. They could just walk away or ignore things that are failing. Or they could set up a Maintenance Fee and those making money using the project's binary outputs can help offset that burden.

It's one more tool in the Open Source Sustainability toolkit.

> The sponsorship seems to introduce a business model around what is FOSS, then it’s not FOSS anymore.

That's not true. I worked very hard with our lawyers to make everything copasetic with OSS and FOSS.

> I think the outrage is unwarranted.

I've seen no outrage. Actually, I've seen quite a bit of support for the idea, I've heard a number of good clarifying questions, I've a few complain that this is bad for OSS or something. It's been surprisingly great actually. :)

Re: Open Source Maintenance Fee

#104

Post by TrueDuality »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #76
TrueDuality wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Start-ups and smaller companies that are extremely cash strapped are willing to take an opensource project, compile it themselves, turn it into deployment artifacts and manage that whole lifecycle. There is a threshold where paying someone to manage and certify the lifecycle of tools is more valuable than keeping it in house. This is pushing those enterprise customers that are just using and updating binary releases…

I agree with your point. In the name of promoting basic numeracy: """ Sign up for GitHub Sponsorship and create the tiers: Small organization ( 100 people): $60/mo """ You are beyond 'cash strapped' if $10/month for something as fundamental as this breaks the bank. The fully loaded cost of a single US software developer is already above $100/hour.

Sure, but that also doesn't scale reasonably and is entirely a facile argument. My original comment supports organization paying this price instead of dealing with internal compliance burdens. Looking at one of the package lock files for a previous company I still occasionally contract for, there are 9400 dependencies referenced.

So in the name of promoting basic numeracy, and taking into account the realities of scale. Matching that cost for those dependencies (this is a >100 person company) would be $560k per month. That gets you minimal support, just a guarantee that you can submit issues. No guaranteed security maintenance, compliance, or governance of the project.

You can spin up a very strong developer team for forking and maintaining an internal copy of opensource projects at that cost and a lot of large companies do just that. Should they contribute those changes back? Sure if that made sense.

A lot of time in my experience that internal copy is stripped to the bones of functionality to remove the surface area of vulnerabilities if the useful piece isn't extracted into the larger body of code directly. It's less functional with major changes specific to that environment. Would the upstream accept that massive gutting? Probably not. Could the company publish their minimal version? Sure but there are costs there as well and you DO have to justify that time and cost.

Would a company in-house the support and development of a tool over $40/month? Absolutely not, for a one-off case that's probably fine. If you want to meaningfully address the compensation issue from enterprises, opensource single-project subscriptions aren't going to be the answer.

I would LOVE to see more developer incentive programs, but one-by-one options aren't scalable and most projects don't want to provide the table-stakes level of support required of any vendor they work with. It's not optional for those organizations, its law and private contracts.

Re: Open Source Maintenance Fee

#105

Post by nevon »

LtWorf wrote: post #100
hbn wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it's a "free if you're not generating revenue" model which is similar to JetBrains' recent "free for non-commercial use" releases of their IDEs, and I believe Docker does something like that too. And famously WinRar which will nag you to upgrade every time you open it but doesn't actually force you to buy it, but expect enterprises will if they don't want to risk lawsuits.

But why call it open source if it's no longer open source?

It is open source. The code is still available under the same license as before. They are just charging for binary builds.

Re: Open Source Maintenance Fee

#106

Post by robmensching »

nine_k wrote: post #56
orochimaaru wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have mixed feelings about this. I’m not a Wix user so this is a general comment on the substance of this. As an open source project no one is forcing you to maintain it. Every fix you put in is something that you do of your own volition. No company can force you to accept a PR or work on it. I think FOSS developers often get stressed about this but unless you personally have financial motivations around what you’ve…

AFAICT, the fee applies if you're using binary releases, or if you open issues, and are also generating revenue from the project. Apparently you can grab the sources and build the binaries yourself (as per the OSS license), never ask for support (by reporting issues), and still have to pay nothing, even in a commercial setting. It looks a bit similar to the RedHat model: they release open-source software (Linux kerne…

> It looks a bit similar to the RedHat model

Yes, very good recognition. The Open Source Maintenance Fee follows several of the paths RedHat paved long ago.

> This may give CTOs an easy way to expense such support

I'm finding it actually gives the CTOs (or someone a bit lower in the chain) the _requirement_ to pay like they always wanted to before. Said another way, in the past, many devs/leads/managers would say, "Oh, I'd like to sponsor this project but I can't get through procurement." With the OSMF, now they have the forcing function to help them through. This is not hypothetical, I've had companies tell me exactly this.

> becoming a GitHub sponsor is more involved than many would like;

GitHub Sponsors is great... except for a few very real cases where it is not. This is on my radar to improve over time.

Re: Open Source Maintenance Fee

#107

Post by robmensching »

derefr wrote: post #78
nine_k wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAICT, the fee applies if you're using binary releases, or if you open issues, and are also generating revenue from the project. Apparently you can grab the sources and build the binaries yourself (as per the OSS license), never ask for support (by reporting issues), and still have to pay nothing, even in a commercial setting. It looks a bit similar to the RedHat model: they release open-source software (Linux kerne…

> or if you open issues I feel like there should be an exception carved out to this policy, if the submitter of an issue is offering to create (or, as a corporation, dedicate their own engineers' time to creating) a PR to resolve the problem the issue describes. As a maintainer of a few OSS projects myself, I see my fair share of "choosing beggars" (i.e. people who don't mentally model others' motivations, and so use…

We're still working through the best way to talk about issues and PRs. This is an area where I expect maintainers to differ in how they apply the OSMF (every maintainer I've spoken to is 100% behind requiring payment for binaries).

I wholly agree with the sentiment of your comment and we're still learning.

Note: At this time, my project (WiX Toolset) does not require the OSMF for PRs. If there is a README that says we do, then I probably need to fix it.

Re: Open Source Maintenance Fee

#108

Post by stereolambda »

WorldMaker wrote: post #83
guluarte wrote: post #62

I haven't fully read it yet, but it would be great if GitHub had "bounties" where users could submit an issue/request with a bounty attached.

I think the issue with bounties is that to do a proper bounty program you want a third-party escrow agent that can decide when the issue/request has been addressed sufficiently to warrant paying the bounty. I don't think GitHub wants to be directly in that business as a third-party escrow agent hiring people to review issues/requests versus changelogs, but they probably could find ways to help people find such third-…

Moreso: what if someone fulfils it in a fork.

Re: Open Source Maintenance Fee

#109

Post by mendelmaleh »

orochimaaru wrote: post #49
trjordan wrote: post #31

I love the innovation. The basic idea here appears to be: - Nobody wants this to be closed source. The code is freely available, and you may do with it as you want. The marginal cost to distribute the code is 0, after all. - The maintainers, as people, don't want to do charity work for companies. Their time is limited, and if they're going to support revenue-generating activities, they want a cut of the revenue. So e…

I have mixed feelings about this. I’m not a Wix user so this is a general comment on the substance of this. As an open source project no one is forcing you to maintain it. Every fix you put in is something that you do of your own volition. No company can force you to accept a PR or work on it. I think FOSS developers often get stressed about this but unless you personally have financial motivations around what you’ve…

The existing software stays absolutely FOSS. The development of it is absolutely not free.

Re: Open Source Maintenance Fee

#110

Post by ozim »

orochimaaru wrote: post #49
trjordan wrote: post #31

I love the innovation. The basic idea here appears to be: - Nobody wants this to be closed source. The code is freely available, and you may do with it as you want. The marginal cost to distribute the code is 0, after all. - The maintainers, as people, don't want to do charity work for companies. Their time is limited, and if they're going to support revenue-generating activities, they want a cut of the revenue. So e…

I have mixed feelings about this. I’m not a Wix user so this is a general comment on the substance of this. As an open source project no one is forcing you to maintain it. Every fix you put in is something that you do of your own volition. No company can force you to accept a PR or work on it. I think FOSS developers often get stressed about this but unless you personally have financial motivations around what you’ve…

No one is forcing you to maintain it … but successful projects have community and people who rely on the project who somehow trust the dev.

Once you say „I am not fixing it” there will be lots of people who will stop participating in community and project might die.

Post reply on HN