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Open Source Maintenance Fee

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Re: Open Source Maintenance Fee

#131

Post by robmensching »

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #91

>While the source code is freely available under the terms of the LICENSE, all other aspects of the project--including opening or commenting on issues, participating in discussions and downloading releases--require adherence to the Maintenance Fee. Surprised downloading releases is in there, I'm not a lawyer but I'm pretty sure this goes against it's own license on the source code, specifically: >each contributor gra…

Absolutely true, but that isn't what happened (at least, not yet). Most companies found the fee reasonable and worth it to have us maintain the project and not have to fork it.

Re: Open Source Maintenance Fee

#132

Post by robmensching »

nikanj wrote: post #18

That ticket was opened in March 2025 with enforcement starting in April 2025. Pretty short notice.

The window was definitely smaller than I would consider ideal. But the OSMF only applied to WiX v6 (released in April) and later. So, all the older versions would not be impacted.

Also, the timing was never raised as an issue by anyone in the community. If there had been significant pushback, I would have definitely re-evaluated the timing.

The launch went really well though.

Re: Open Source Maintenance Fee

#133

Post by robmensching »

thayne wrote: post #98
derefr wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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…

100%. We're still learning here. I also don't expect every project to choose the same policy on how they tackle issues/PRs when requiring an Open Source Maintenance Fee.

Re: Open Source Maintenance Fee

#134

Post by robmensching »

mikestorrent wrote: post #61
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…

> companies would not mind paying a small amount to help support the OSS projects they depend on meanwhile I've been trying to find a way to give Hashicorp some money for over a decade of depending on their tools, but their products simply are too good to need the enterprise versions! At some point we need something like a "certified B corporation" for "certified ethical fair-trade Free Software using corporation" wh…

Yes! There are many Open Source projects my company depends on (like Astro, Vue, and Vite for our web sites) that I would love to pay a Maintenance Fee to encourage the maintainers to keep on keeping on. For all Open Source projects that we depend on and accept sponsors, we do pay the $10 "fee" even if they don't require it.

Re: Open Source Maintenance Fee

#135

Post by robmensching »

zvr wrote: post #95
ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They actually provide the github action they use to build the releases in their repo already, so you could likely get this done in under 5 minutes.

And that's what a number of organizations have set up since March.

No. Not really. There are 406 forks, and ~10 were created in the last 5 months. The other people on this thread are more correct.

Re: Open Source Maintenance Fee

#136

Post by robmensching »

lars_francke wrote: post #5

Not commenting on the substance but on the https://opensourcemaintenancefee.org/ homepage itself. It only works in dark mode and is unreadable in light mode. The repo doesn't allow opening issues. Maybe the author reads here... (long shot)

Oh, snap! That's bad. It's fixed (thanks to a random contributor :)

Re: Open Source Maintenance Fee

#137

Post by robmensching »

bstsb wrote: post #75
lars_francke wrote: post #5

Not commenting on the substance but on the https://opensourcemaintenancefee.org/ homepage itself. It only works in dark mode and is unreadable in light mode. The repo doesn't allow opening issues. Maybe the author reads here... (long shot)

you have to pay the fee to submit issues, obviously ;)

Heh, funny. My goal was to funnel questions and comments into a single location: the Discussion forum.

Re: Open Source Maintenance Fee

#138

Post by robmensching »

scottydelta wrote: post #4

Looking at the comments, seems it might be a headache to manage this at open source level. The enforcement itself seems to be tough to manage.

Honestly, thus far it's been a relative breeze. I expected the need to work out "bugs" as the idea is new. My hope is that after we address the bulk of the issues that actual consumers have raised about the OSMF, it'll be relatively trivial for other projects to pick up in the future.

Note: A few Open Source projects have already added the OSMF. I've not yet followed up to see how it is going for them.

Re: Open Source Maintenance Fee

#139

Post by robmensching »

jhot wrote: post #79
digianarchist wrote: post #34

Earlier 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…

I've been out of the windows world for about 10 years or so, but before that I was the one tasked at my company with streamlining our installers from a CI/CD perspective. I do agree that WiX is complicated and you really have to dig through the docs and do a lot of trial and error, but at the time I couldn't find any alternatives that allowed for the automation that I could achieve with WiX. That said it was still so…

Yeah, the build system integration was always one of the core benefits provided by the WiX Toolset. I know you're not working with MSI any longer, but in recent versions of WiX Toolset we _finally_ nailed down how to include files in the .wxs file using the new `Files` element in a way that wouldn't break other MSI features (like patching).

Re: Open Source Maintenance Fee

#140

Post by robmensching »

constantcrying wrote: post #120
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…

They totally have the wrong approach. The EULA is completely bizarre and the implementation even worse. What they should have done is saying "If you aren't a sponsor we do not care about your issues." Right now clicking the download button is a violation of their EULA, which is probably something you want to avoid when trying to get companies to give you money.

I disagree. The EULA is an extremely elegant solution to activate an organization's legal team to help their procurement team sponsor Open Source projects.
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