151–160 of 260 posts
This sucks out the joy of Open Source development, which is freedom to do anything, change anything and not responsible for anyone else. At the point you require payments, users can have expectations and requests, which turns your project into a job.
In this case the joy was already sucked out a while ago by entitled users.
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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.
The OSMF's goal is to keep the software FOSS and the maintainers involved.
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…
Anybody should be able pay up for the feature/support and it should be closed source until some threshold. That could take years or months depending on the interest/income. Eventually it will become open source. Otherwise, everybody will wait for someone to pay for the thing they want. Obviously this needs to be worked up a bit so not to maintain N forks but it can work.
I 100% support this. I wish more open source maintainers would take steps like this sooner rather than feeling stressed and undervalued and burning out. It seems very cheap for what it is.
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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.
The only object is that monthly fees are super annoying. I'd much prefer an annual :shrug:
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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…
Yes, just a couple of minutes setting up a Github action on a fork, and you're good to go.
* Last count the WiX Toolset had 589,719 loc but 444,936 if you skip comments and whitespace.
* This is the point, maintaining successful (and often non-trivial) projects requires a good bit of work.
I thought the license was still owned by Microsoft? https://github.com/wixtoolset/wix?tab=License-1-ov-file#read... Also, the exact wording is: "a EULA on binary releases (including those published to GitHub and NuGet.org) requires payment of the Maintenance Fee" I'm not a lawyer, but doesn't that mean that I can compile the code myself to circumvent the Maintenance Fee, and give the binaries away for free?
> but doesn't that mean that I can compile the code myself to circumvent the Maintenance Fee, and give the binaries away for free?
Yep. Now you are responsible for the ~500K lines of code. Totally allowed by the license. Enjoy your fork! :)
Not a lawyer so confused about how requiring a fee to get the binary is in practice compatible with open source licenses, which grant the right to redistribute said binary. I.e. even if the project itself does not want to give me a copy of the binary, anyone who has obtained that binary can lawfully gice it to me. Basically, my understanding is that as long as the software is released under an open source license it…
For one thing, I don't think they think they have a silver bullet here. I think they want some financial support and if some users of the project pay the fee that will be some success. To the specifics, it's not a software license fee -- they aren't selling access to the software. It's a "maintenance fee", to fund the project . So the license of the code isn't a problem, you can (still) choose to license that under w…
I don't think there is a silver bullet. But I do think we can do better than we are today supporting the sustainability of Open Source projects. The OSMF is an attempt to do just that.
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For one thing, I don't think they think they have a silver bullet here. I think they want some financial support and if some users of the project pay the fee that will be some success. To the specifics, it's not a software license fee -- they aren't selling access to the software. It's a "maintenance fee", to fund the project . So the license of the code isn't a problem, you can (still) choose to license that under w…
> > Also, if you choose to not pay the Maintenance Fee, but find yourself returning to check on the status of issues or review answers to questions others ask, you are still using the project and should pay the Maintenance Fee. I think this is going to hard against the "economy of gift" and isn't going to play well in the end. If they were hosting their own forum / mailing list, charging to access the community would…
Here's the consumers FAQ of the underlying initiative (the Open Source Maintenance fee): https://opensourcemaintenancefee.org/consumers/faq/