Open source projects should run office hours

> In general, fact that someone created or maintains or supports open source projects should not be considered to create any obligations beyond lack of malice and abuse.

I think we need to separate open source products and open source projects. A product being the main product of a for-profit company or a marketing tool by a for-profit company and a project being something that someone released just to be nice, to show off, etc.

I literally tried to use a dev tooling SaaS service their offical integration broke my build in 3 different ways. What makes this all the worse is that the integration shouldn't even be enabled in test mode. It was configured not to, but still it broke my build in 3 different ways. I literally decided to use a competitor straight away. But wanted to at least let them know of the issues. The tickets to their offical integration were responded to by volunteers. After a few days I noticed no employees of this company that raised 65 Million had shown up to look into build breaking bugs in their dev tooling product. I tweeted that they were relying on volunteers to do support. The CTO said that was absolutely not true then said with open source people will volunteer and that is a benefit. So in the one tweet is contradicted himself, weirdly this tweet was well liked. They went on to use the fact I am free to use a self hosted OSS version of the product, support is a bit much to ask. My issue wasn't that they had volunteers helping out, it was that it was literally only volunteers. The volunteers rightly pointed out they're volunteers and said the company provides paid support. Then went on to say that the company won't be able to help since they write and maintain the product and they're the domain experts for this area. Again, relying... Both the issues ended up being closed because "We don't think it's our code and we can't reproduct". Considering these are build breaking bugs that you will encounter while onboarding to the paid product that response is not acceptable. It is acceptable in this is free and unoffical.

Open Source is not an excuse to be unprofessional. Saying "Well you don't have to use our paid product you can use OSS" when someone points out the support provided for the paid product is unprofessional and is not a valid excuse for providing crappy support. Saying this is GitHub and not a valid place to expect a company to support their techincal products is not professional. As an industry, we need to step away from the unprofessionalism that open source has brought to the table. People literally have talks saying do open source it's good for your professional career and in the day tweet complaining and asking if an open source project they use to boost their professional career is dead.

Honestly, I think free open source for companies should be a thing of the past and we should move towards paid license with paid support. The number of companies that will be completely screwed if one over worked guy in Milan decides to stop working on a hobby project is unacceptable.

We should be creating obligiations on things that are clearly for professional gain and putting a price tag on those obligations.

/rant

“Office hours” is something you hear in college. It’s a stated time of the week where the professor will be in their office and students can stop by to discuss course material, assignments, and ask questions in a one-on-one situation.

The submission title appears to be editorialized. Original title is "Open source projects: consider running office hours"

And the article talks about the purpose being for gathering feedback (think UX sessions), not for gratuitous support. Meaning that goal is for the project maintainer to draw benefits from others donating their time.

Personally I think this a really clever idea

> Under GPL-like licenses you are obligated to provide source code if you provide a binary

No, this requirement applies only if you are using somebody's else GPL code, and it's meant to allow other developers and users to benefit from the work done.

It does not apply to the original author because the author owns the copyright of that code.

Such office hours could have a price. Given how much consultants charge it wouldn't be unreasonable to charge $500/hour (being a maintainer comes with deep knowledge).