101–110 of 397 posts
I ran a moderately large opensource service and my chronic back pain was cured the day I stopped maintaining the project. Working for free is not fun. Having a paid offering with a free community version is not fun. Ultimately, dealing with people who don't pay for your product is not fun. I learnt this the hard way and I guess the MinIO team learnt this as well.
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I guess we need a new type of Open Source license. One that is very permissive except if you are a company with a much larger revenue than the company funding the open source project, then you have to pay. While I loath the moves to closed source you also can't fault them the hyperscalers just outcompete them with their own software.
I ran a moderately large opensource service and my chronic back pain was cured the day I stopped maintaining the project. Working for free is not fun. Having a paid offering with a free community version is not fun. Ultimately, dealing with people who don't pay for your product is not fun. I learnt this the hard way and I guess the MinIO team learnt this as well.
Good luck with the back pain.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If your main motivation creating/maintaince a popular open source project was to make money then you don't really undersand the open source ethos.
it's not about the money. for large open source projects you need to allocate time to deal with the community. for someone that just wants to put code out there that is very draining and unpleasant. most projects won't ever reach that level though.
OP sure makes it sound like it's about the money.
> for someone that just wants to put code out there that is very draining and unpleasant.
I never understood this. Then why publish the code in the first place? If the goal is to help others, then the decent thing would be to add documentation and support the people who care enough to use your project. This doesn't mean bending to all their wishes and doing work you don't enjoy, but a certain level of communication and collaboration is core to the idea of open source. Throwing some code over the fence and forgetting about it is only marginally better than releasing proprietary software. I can only interpret this behavior as self-serving for some reason (self-promotion, branding, etc.).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
it's not about the money. for large open source projects you need to allocate time to deal with the community. for someone that just wants to put code out there that is very draining and unpleasant. most projects won't ever reach that level though.
> it's not about the money OP sure makes it sound like it's about the money. > for someone that just wants to put code out there that is very draining and unpleasant. I never understood this. Then why publish the code in the first place? If the goal is to help others, then the decent thing would be to add documentation and support the people who care enough to use your project. This doesn't mean bending to all their…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> then doing a bait-and-switch FOSS is not a moral contract. People working for free owe nothing to no one. You got what's on the tin - the code is as open source once they stop as when they started. The underlying assumption of your message is that you are somehow entitled to their continued labour which is absolutely not the case.
It's a social contract, which for many people is a moral contract.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
it's not about the money. for large open source projects you need to allocate time to deal with the community. for someone that just wants to put code out there that is very draining and unpleasant. most projects won't ever reach that level though.
> it's not about the money OP sure makes it sound like it's about the money. > for someone that just wants to put code out there that is very draining and unpleasant. I never understood this. Then why publish the code in the first place? If the goal is to help others, then the decent thing would be to add documentation and support the people who care enough to use your project. This doesn't mean bending to all their…
Then the third user shows up. They have an odd edge case and the code isn't working. Fixing it will take some back and forth but it still can be done in a respectable amount of time. All is good. A few more users might show up, but most open source projects will maintain a small audience. Everyone is happy.
Sometimes, projects keep gaining popularity. Slowly at first, but the growth in interest is there. More bug reports, more discussions, more pull requests. The author didn't expect it. What was doable before takes more effort now. Even if the author adds contributors, they are now a project and a community manager. It requires different skills and a certain mindset. Not everyone is cut out for this. They might even handle a small community pretty well, but at a certain size it gets difficult.
The level of communication and collaboration required can only grow. Not everyone can deal with this and that's ok.
I ran a moderately large opensource service and my chronic back pain was cured the day I stopped maintaining the project. Working for free is not fun. Having a paid offering with a free community version is not fun. Ultimately, dealing with people who don't pay for your product is not fun. I learnt this the hard way and I guess the MinIO team learnt this as well.
There's nothing wrong at all with charging for your product. What I do take issue with, however, is convincing everyone that your product is FOSS, waiting until people undertake a lot of work to integrate your product into their infrastructure, and then doing a bait-and-switch. Just be honest since the start that your product will eventually abandon its FOSS licence. Then people can make an informed decision. Or, if…
License terms don't end there. There is a no warranty clause too in almost every open source license and it is as important as the other parts of the license. There is no promise or guarantees for updates or future versions.
I've used minio a lot but only as part of my local dev pipeline to emulate s3, and never paid.