More and more I’m starting to see users of completely free and community-run open source projects expecting the same level of polish and customer service as proprietary commercial software, doing nothing to support or contribute to development while only complaining about how horrible they are when they are not able to do that. Then they switch to proprietary software, and when corporate enshitification happens to that software, they proceed to wonder why open source projects are all dying and corporate software vendors are getting more brazen in their shitty business practices due to not having serious open source competitors anymore. It’s whatever when individual people do it with software on their personal computers, but when the businesses that use it as core components of their stack basically have the same only take and never give attitude, is it any wonder that open source is struggling?
Hot take: when I first got into open source, I turned my nose up at the licenses that restrict large scale commercial use just like everyone else. Open Source Foundation sure hates them and refuses to even consider them open source. But as I understand the software industry better, I’m starting to come around to them. If you’re a company whose profits are over some threshold and you make that money through the use of open source software, why shouldn’t you have to give back to it? I think it’s not unreasonable that if you’re a billion dollar company running your entire computer infrastructure on open source projects, you should be required to contribute a small percentage of your profits to their continued development. Said software obviously brought you a ton of value so why shouldn’t you be expected to give back even a fraction of that value?
I’m confident Autodesk wouldn’t have introduced indie pricing if it weren’t for Blender’s rise in popularity. Competition is good for everyone (except a company like Autodesk trying to get the highest returns for the least effort).
A skightly different view, but when I started a lot of companies did give back. I have worked with, hired, managed and led at least a half dozen teams with the explicit mission to make an already existing open source project do what we want by contributing functionality upstream, or by forking the project. I actually wrote a “open source engineering management” curriculum back when I was still teaching.
Unfortunately these efforts often sttuggle in a similar way - some developer who is not affiliated with us starts creating friction, and blowing up internal schedules, sometimes seemingly on purpose. Management starts to ask why so many of our features are dependent on SkankTopia6969 approving PRs and awkward conversations ensue. And then the project slowly becomes the process of educating an increasingly detached internal hierarchy on the realities of open source development, and people inevitability start asking why this is even in-house tooling in the first place.
Despite that, I’ve fielded a bunch of products like this, though always at fairly small scale (like $10M/yr revenue). The only time I’ve really done it big league the project got canned during a technical reorg.
For completion, this is what the GNU GPL license encourages : it makes it so someone can’t sell their software without also providing the source, in the event they used your GPL-licensed library. It’s the good kind of trickle-down
More and more I’m starting to see users of completely free and community-run open source projects expecting the same level of polish and customer service as proprietary commercial software, doing nothing to support or contribute to development while only complaining about how horrible they are when they are not able to do that. Then they switch to proprietary software, and when corporate enshitification happens to that software, they proceed to wonder why open source projects are all dying and corporate software vendors are getting more brazen in their shitty business practices due to not having serious open source competitors anymore. It’s whatever when individual people do it with software on their personal computers, but when the businesses that use it as core components of their stack basically have the same only take and never give attitude, is it any wonder that open source is struggling?
Hot take: when I first got into open source, I turned my nose up at the licenses that restrict large scale commercial use just like everyone else. Open Source Foundation sure hates them and refuses to even consider them open source. But as I understand the software industry better, I’m starting to come around to them. If you’re a company whose profits are over some threshold and you make that money through the use of open source software, why shouldn’t you have to give back to it? I think it’s not unreasonable that if you’re a billion dollar company running your entire computer infrastructure on open source projects, you should be required to contribute a small percentage of your profits to their continued development. Said software obviously brought you a ton of value so why shouldn’t you be expected to give back even a fraction of that value?
I’m confident Autodesk wouldn’t have introduced indie pricing if it weren’t for Blender’s rise in popularity. Competition is good for everyone (except a company like Autodesk trying to get the highest returns for the least effort).
A skightly different view, but when I started a lot of companies did give back. I have worked with, hired, managed and led at least a half dozen teams with the explicit mission to make an already existing open source project do what we want by contributing functionality upstream, or by forking the project. I actually wrote a “open source engineering management” curriculum back when I was still teaching.
Unfortunately these efforts often sttuggle in a similar way - some developer who is not affiliated with us starts creating friction, and blowing up internal schedules, sometimes seemingly on purpose. Management starts to ask why so many of our features are dependent on SkankTopia6969 approving PRs and awkward conversations ensue. And then the project slowly becomes the process of educating an increasingly detached internal hierarchy on the realities of open source development, and people inevitability start asking why this is even in-house tooling in the first place.
Despite that, I’ve fielded a bunch of products like this, though always at fairly small scale (like $10M/yr revenue). The only time I’ve really done it big league the project got canned during a technical reorg.
For completion, this is what the GNU GPL license encourages : it makes it so someone can’t sell their software without also providing the source, in the event they used your GPL-licensed library. It’s the good kind of trickle-down
In another thread I mentioned OSI needs another tier to handle forced noncommercial source available licenses. Got down voted to hell and back.
Glad to see there are others of similar mind.