If only this was voluntary and automated by an Open Source service provider, so that I only have to pay one monthly fee and all the FOSS that is detected to be in-use on my machine is funded.
Open Source Maintenance Fee
121–130 of 260 posts
Re: Open Source Maintenance Fee
#122Re: Open Source Maintenance Fee
#123I 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…
> Yeah they can complain, but you have zero obligation to fix.
True, but if you want people to use your software you can't ignore the issues they raised, especially if they are valid and not some niche use cases, otherwise the project may come off as poorly maintained.
Re: Open Source Maintenance Fee
#124The WiX installer is a byzantine incomprehensible mess. Its only appeal was that it was free. If I have to pay, I'd rather have a commercial product that is supported and easier to use. Rob Mensching was supposed to monetize WiX by offering $5,000/yr enterprise consulting & support services. I guess that's not enough.
WiX basically lets you directly write the internal data structures used by Windows Installer to run the MSIs. Just in XML instead of some ancient binary database that is used in the MSI files to store things.
So the actual "byzantine incomprehensible mess" (which is indeed the correct description) is the MSI format and Windows Installer, not WiX.
Re: Open Source Maintenance Fee
#125I 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…
pull back the layers. This is the usual masking of the facts. A rose by any other name... is after money. FOSS is destroyed the moment that is introduced to the mix. Its like political sells - begin pushing a small degree, they wont notice the temperature as it rises over time until its closed source and corporate. This is how you kill off FOSS, or your project. "corporate creep" I call it.
FOSS is destroyed with overly permissive licenses that allow entities with a lot of capital to productize software as closed source while giving back the original author/maintainer exactly 0.
Re: Open Source Maintenance Fee
#126Earlier 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.
It’s $10/mo and then like 15min/$50/mo in everyone’s time in admin chasing down and filing receipts, reconciling to bank statements, etc.
If you’re a founder doing your own finances, well every additional little monthly charge even if it’s just $1 is quite annoying:
Filing and reconciling 12 receipts takes say 1 hour per year, what if you’re using 20 dependencies? That’s an extra 3-5 days per annum of admin.
Re: Open Source Maintenance Fee
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's shocking to me that Microsoft aren't heavily involved with the project considering it's one of the fundamental frameworks for releasing software on Windows. I've had the displeasure of using Wix and it's an incredibly complicated and poorly documented platform that had us reaching for paid competitors in order to get our installer shipped. I realized shortly after that it's not really Wix's fault. Windows is squ…
> It's shocking to me that Microsoft aren't heavily involved with the project considering it's one of the fundamental frameworks for releasing software on Windows. The history of WiX is that it started internally at Microsoft. IIRC it was a project under the Office organization originally. It's generally considered the first big open source success of Microsoft in spinning a project out to open source community owner…
For reference, here is the MSIX Toolset code repository:
Re: Open Source Maintenance Fee
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
pull back the layers. This is the usual masking of the facts. A rose by any other name... is after money. FOSS is destroyed the moment that is introduced to the mix. Its like political sells - begin pushing a small degree, they wont notice the temperature as it rises over time until its closed source and corporate. This is how you kill off FOSS, or your project. "corporate creep" I call it.
FOSS is destroyed with overly permissive licenses that allow entities with a lot of capital to productize software as closed source while giving back the original author/maintainer exactly 0.
How does that scenario alter free and open source software?
The software is still open and free.
But in your scenario you're just super angry you didn't figure out to make money off your work.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest that you never, ever contribute to FOSS and instead just buckle down and focus on selling your blobs.
Re: Open Source Maintenance Fee
#129I 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…
I think many open source projects already experience two buckets of contributors which maps nicely to the two class distinction inherent in this model:
1) a bunch of people who contributed one or two PRs, but it took the maintainers more time to review/merge the PR than the dev time contributed
2) a much smaller set of people who come back and do more and more PRs, eventually contributing more time than it takes to review their work
A major existing reason to review PRs from class 1 "once or twice" contributors (perhaps the main reason?) is that all class 2 "maintainer-level" contributors start as class 1.
I agree there's an awkward middle ground here, now you have to define where the boundary is between class 1 and class 2, but I think if you were able to graph contribution level you'd find there's already something of a bimodal distribution naturally in many projects anyway.
Re: Open Source Maintenance Fee
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's complicated. Reviewing a PR takes time and effort, and the maintainer may not want to do that for a feature that mainly benefits a company that isn't paying the maintenance fee. OTOH, as a maintainer, if a company finds a bug that would impact a lot of users, I would want them to report it, regardless of their payment status. But saying something like "Issues from paying customers/donors have higher priority" is…
I guess the point is if someone discovers a bug and opens a PR to fix it, then that person is, in a way, also a maintainer. They are “paying” for the maintanence of the project in time and effort.
No. A maintainer is someone who maintains the project. Fixing a bug is a great contribution and makes you a contributor to the project. But you need stick around the project for a while, fixing issues that keep the project running and doing tasks that aren't necessarily required for your use of the project to become a maintainer.