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Open Source Maintenance Fee

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Re: Open Source Maintenance Fee

#241

Post by jackdawipper »

robmensching wrote: post #143
jackdawipper wrote: post #119

Earlier 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.

My experience is that FOSS is being destroyed by entitled consumers. Note: I'm not saying you're an entitled consumer, but I interviewed many maintainers of successful Open Source projects. The number one issue for all of them was entitled consumers.

I take back my previous comment since I can't now edit it. I was wrong. I think the approach makes sense. There is nothing wrong with getting paid by commericial interests. Its the difficult side of FOSS where finding balance between the two worlds is kind of hard to achieve in a perfect way.

Re: Open Source Maintenance Fee

#242

Post by robmensching »

threemux wrote: post #228
robmensching wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This hasn't been the case as of yet. We've had many large companies just pay the sponsorship. Honestly, the problem is not the EULA, it's the need for more flexibility in invoicing than GitHub Sponsors provides today. To say it another way, legal is cool with it, the challenge now is making it easy for procurement.

Honest question: how would you know if companies stopped using the product as a result of this change? Presumably the only ones you'd hear from are ones that managed to get through the process far enough to complain about procurement (which is definitely another issue, pretty sure GitHub Sponsors doesn't do net 60...)

Oh, I (would and do) expect we'll see our download numbers (nuget.org and GitHub both track those) decrease. Or maybe consumers will choose to stay on a version before the OSMF was introduced longer. So, we'll kinda' be able to tell.

Simplifying the payment process for procurement is my focus in OSMF (after I get some work done at my day job) to minimize any friction.

Re: Open Source Maintenance Fee

#243

Post by robmensching »

AndyNemmity wrote: post #232
threemux wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: how would you know if companies stopped using the product as a result of this change? Presumably the only ones you'd hear from are ones that managed to get through the process far enough to complain about procurement (which is definitely another issue, pretty sure GitHub Sponsors doesn't do net 60...)

right, we wouldn't mention it at all. no way legal would approve it, so we'd just move to something else.

Legal in many companies of different sizes, from Microsoft to tiny ones, have all evaluated and approved of the OSMF EULA. Now, it's fine if someone says I don't want to deal with the EULA. But, in that case, my project didn't mean that much to them in the first place.

I'm listening to concerns and adapting. As noted above, so far, it's gone very well.

Re: Open Source Maintenance Fee

#244

Post by robmensching »

zvr wrote: post #238
robmensching wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The number of publicly visible forks does not represent the number of organizations compiling their own binaries and internally mandating the use of such binaries. Mind you, I never implied that there are thousands or hundreds of such cases. But there are some.

Oh, sure there are some. There were some before. It's Open Source after all. That's kinda' the point. :)

If more consumers choose to take on the work of maintaining their own fork because of the OSMF, that's okay too. I believe we are more likely to get contributions if more developers are in the code instead of just consuming binary builds. That's another small reason why I believe the OSMF can work.

Re: Open Source Maintenance Fee

#245

Post by robmensching »

jackdawipper wrote: post #241
robmensching wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience is that FOSS is being destroyed by entitled consumers. Note: I'm not saying you're an entitled consumer, but I interviewed many maintainers of successful Open Source projects. The number one issue for all of them was entitled consumers.

I take back my previous comment since I can't now edit it. I was wrong. I think the approach makes sense. There is nothing wrong with getting paid by commericial interests. Its the difficult side of FOSS where finding balance between the two worlds is kind of hard to achieve in a perfect way.

I appreciate that "edit". :)

And, yes, you are very correct that finding balance is very challenging. However, I feel that the OSMF suits the bill quite well, at least for projects of a shape and size that I'm familiar with.

Re: Open Source Maintenance Fee

#246

Post by mikestorrent »

nine_k wrote: post #73
mikestorrent wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You can open https://www.hashicorp.com/en/pricing and contact their sales department! Also, wasn't there an uproar when Terraform turned slightly less free? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37081306

Oh, I've been through the sales process. The trouble is that everything I've ever NEEDED has been free, and everything I might concievably want is locked behind a fairly high price threshold that I can never justify.

They need some way for folks like me to get our companies to pay like $5k a year ARR for something that makes it more useful without going the full enterprise route.

Re: Open Source Maintenance Fee

#247

Post by kvemkon »

robmensching wrote: post #149
TrueDuality wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but that also doesn't scale reasonably and is entirely a facile argument. My original comment supports organization paying this price instead of dealing with internal compliance burdens. Looking at one of the package lock files for a previous company I still occasionally contract for, there are 9400 dependencies referenced. So in the name of promoting basic numeracy, and taking into account the realities of sca…

Note that the package.lock file is not the place to look for your OSMF dependencies. That file will list your project's dependencies and all of their dependencies and so on and so on. You want to look at the list of packages in your package.json file. That will almost certainly be an order of magnitude (or two) smaller. For example, IIRC, GitHub (all of GitHub) calculated they had 660 direct dependencies. That's stil…

OSMF could got name like WiX Toolset Maintenance Fee. Similar to how the Apache License got its name.

Re: Open Source Maintenance Fee

#248

Post by kvemkon »

robmensching wrote: post #140
constantcrying wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Keeping downloads/installation behind EULA seems controversial (with all the discussed pros and cons). But prohibiting (or even making it illegal?) to open an issue seems to disrupt how free software communities work. Of course you are free to delay feedback for e.g. 2 weeks (see free access to lwn.net) or not to answer at all or to mark such an issue and move it to discussions but not to limit feedback to your project in such a way.

Re: Open Source Maintenance Fee

#249

Post by kvemkon »

robmensching wrote: post #101
johannes1234321 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> This can make it harder to recruit further contributors as there is a two-clays system of contributors. We'll see. I haven't seen any reduction in contributions (not that the project gets lots of contributions because we're the same as every other Open Source project, most consumers just consume). Also, note that the fee is just for maintenance. I've seen near 0% contribution rate for all Open Source projects to "m…

Free software community participants, contributors, can feel discouraged with the diving the whole community in strictly 2 class of only Maintainers vs. Consumers and then demand something like an Open Source Contributors Fee. All those investigative and reporting work about software behavior issues, hard to reproduce issues, bugs only in specific environment or specific circumstances, sharing experience, helping each other and so on, let alone fixing some issues on their owns and posting PRs.

Re: Open Source Maintenance Fee

#250

Post by lars_francke »

robmensching wrote: post #136
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 :)

Thank you!
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