I'm not saying it doesn't suck for this person, but product market fit is a thing for open source too. If people need it they'll use it and contribute until something better comes along. If not, your idea wasn't the one. That doesn't mean it's not possible. Nearly my whole life runs on open source software, so it's pretty clearly sustainable.

over the years, using "open source" has become an excuse to avoid paying for software

Um. Yes. And to be blunt: obviously. And in return, I give away software I create for free whether people need it or not, and try to give back in the form of contributions too. But I've never once given up my day job for it. Would that be nice? Maybe. But open source software is more frequently sustained by passionate people using and expanding it for their own projects and not by expecting people to pay you for your efforts when you're likely not paying (nodejs, github, ahem) for the software you're building it on anyway.

While I can fully understand his pain, I can't quite follow how adding a paid subscription model will make his life easier (except financially).

Before, he had to deal with entitled asshats, and now he'll have to deal with asshats feeling even more entitled, because they paid for it.

As an open source software maintainer myself, I don't quite agree with some of the points.

I also always believed that if you ever started a project that is valuable for companies, they would support you in return

For me, I do ask for donations, of course, because life is hard and who doesn't want money? Especially when you deserve it. But I never expect anyone to make a donation. It's only when someone actually does it that I feel so much happiness. Some leave a thank you comment and stated that they cannot support me financially, and I'm also perfectly happy with that.

All I got was complaints.

I see it as feature requests and bug reports, and are another kind of contribution. Note that some of the people may seem rude, it could be because they are simply bad at English (as am I) and try their best to write a short sentence. Some may not familiar to GitHub and talk about their problems in an unrelated issue. In that case I simply try my best to understand and kindly answer them, and guide them to the right direction.

It may seem to you that open source is great because it's free to use. Truth is, it certainly is not free.

I use open source software for free, and I want to pay it back by contributing more to open source. I don't forget that my own open source projects also have a lot of other open source components in them, all for free. I don't like to force people to pay for my softwares in order to use it.

Of course, my open source projects will forever be hobby projects, I can never make them into a serious business nor work on them full-time, but I'm fine with that.

Damn

https://github.com/ayan4m1

You should do a better job updating your documentation so that people do not waste their time like I did. This change to closed source was announced where, exactly? All of your READMEs and documentation sites do not mention this. Very easy to be confused and very disappointing to me that this went closed-source.

Not only did you sell out, you also removed all the old versions that were released under an open source license so that others couldn't continue to use out-of-support versions. DISGUSTING.

tl;dr get off GitHub and npm entirely if you want to do the closed-source thing, kthx.

Sorry for this and others. That's a horrible experience.

Then they started complaining that the image search plugin was not compatible with Apple Silicon.

What kind of psycho fucking does this.

I've given up on humanity, but not open source for some reason

Developing software and managing a community are totally different skills and mastering both is not to be taken for granted.

Plus, since you are very passionate about the open source projects you maintain or contribute to, it is difficult to "detach" yourself from people's issues and not feel every criticism as a personal attack (and yes, when your software does not have the features/behavior they expect, some people can express their disappointment in quite a sharp way).

I prefer not to make anyone pay anything but "you get what it is, be warned that you may experience some bugs or lack of support for certain devices" (because I can't buy every piece of hardware and test). Few people have accepted this model but, those who did, have always been supportive and respectful, making me rediscover a little hope that kindness isn't dead at all.

Sucks to see something destroy a mans spirit. Not only did it change his outlook on creating open source but it soured his view on open source in general. Reads a bit overly salty but, understandable as it sounds like he went through a lot.

I think by far the biggest problem with open source is that the user community fundamentally mis-understands the nature of the transaction involving them and the developer(s) of the software they're using.

I think if we could make everyone sit down, take 10 minutes and just read The Social Contract Of Open Source a lot of people would keep developing OSS software.

Brass tacks: You are being given a gift. The person who gave you that gift owes you NOTHING because.. They gave you a gift and by using their software you chose to accept it.

I see it all the time in the open source project I co-maintain, and I have it SUPER easy beacause ours is really just a bundle of configuration files for Neovim.

Ah... This guy sounds a bit like a prima dona tbh. This shit is standard fare for all open source projects.

If you can't handle the heat...

That is naive to think that companies will take your shit for free and give you something back in return.

I dont blame em for going with that decision. Maintainer/devs are also wearing customer service/ PR and bookeeping hat on top of the things they build. Things cost money, especially time, call it greedy or not but people have to pay housing and food. Its tough and similar to a lot of industries, nobody cares until something goes wrong. All the best to this person 👍

Good that this developer speaks up. The recent XZ backdoor story is an example of lack of sustainable infrastructure and normalizing of pushing developers.

You gotta have thick skin to be an open source dev. A lot of people will talk to you with an impressively entitled tone, and say very disrespectful things.

I hope this dev can experience the better side of their community more often, and I sincerely hope they can make a living from their project, even if it stays closed source.

My experience with maintaining open source projects (though mine are very much smaller) is that it's quite similar to a business: you just have to deal with stakeholders and people who think they are stakeholders.

I had all the same experience at work:

• Some unknown person from an unrelated team contacted me because something that my team does not manage broke. I tried to help a few times and I suddenly became their personal IT support team.

• Another time someone not even working at my company demanded that I drop everything and fix their problem, because my name appeared in 3rd parties libraries.

It's sad that open source authors don't always receive the recognition that they deserve.

Fundraising is skill, and it needs to be learnt, I have looked at a fairly large chunk of open source project that are successfully funded and i think that is what sets them apart.

I think it is important that users should have a very clear understanding of how you are doing, if you need X money to keep doing this, there should be a pop up saying you need X money on the software and it should be very hard to miss on the website and read me.

Will some people not like that? probably but you can't please everyone and you shouldn't let a vocal minority determines how things happen.

In my case, I dropped one of my projects because there were so many trolls in the community who called my project crap

Honestly, the biggest enemy at times to the community is ourselves. It is sometimes so demotivating at times.

And the biggest trolls are often the ones with the least knowledge about running projects

It's like the wankers at the moment telling developers not to use GitHub or discord or whatever. They're not going to contribute resources or money to the project, but they'll be a backseat driver

This public issue on the nut.js repo, where I'm publicly accused of something that's entirely not true was the final nail in the coffin.

Damn FOSS geeks, they ruin FOSS!

Why not dual-license?

Copyleft for true FOSS experience or paid option for companies.

uses pushover license

surprised pikachu face when he gets pushed over

every time, folks.

Honestly, this really resonated with me. Running an open source project on its own can be hard, running a popular one that gets used by tons of people and companies, while giving free labor, is extremely hard. Acting as free tech support to a large company, for nothing in return, is ass. Full stop.

I've seen some people make the statement that "maintainers owe you nothing", and I've seen people state that "your supporters owe you nothing."

While I believe there's nothing wrong in a person willingly running a project on their own terms, just as there's nothing wrong with refusing donations and doing the work out of some kind of passion... there's only so many hours in the day, and developers need to feed themselves and pay rent.

I think a lot of people would love to be able to work on open source full-time. I'd devote all of my energy and focus to it, if I could. But, that's a reality only for a privileged few, and many of them still have to make compromises. The CEO and founder of Mastodon, for example, makes a pittance compared to what a corporate junior developer makes.

This is why I completely support Redis and Elastic for their business source licenses, maintainers who :

• provided paid compiled binaries
• refuse pull requests or don't have public issue boards
• respond to demands with "PRs welcome"
• have PR and issue templates with promoting their services
• demand payment from companies
• purposefully use GPLv3 or other infectious licenses to make companies uncomfortable using it in closed source

and so on and so forth.

The OSI definition of opensource ain't gonna pay my bills.

Lobby your company to donate to opensource projects they use. Lobby for them to attribute an opensource budget. If you have money, set aside a budget yourself to donate to opensource projects. If you don't have money, but can code, have time, and the will, contribute to opensource. If you are non-technical and don't have money but use opensource, just promote it.

Whatever you are, be part of the solution and help opensource become a meaningful option to make a living.

Anti Commercial-AI license

I really hope that most of the developers won't listen to this. Any commercialization makes software worse because the devs don't care about it being good as much as if it was fully FOSS. I know it's very hard to maintain large software projects without a sustainable income but hey that's why the community exists. Advertise your software so you can have more users, contributors and donators

All points in the article are completely valid. We live in a crappy world where all anyone wants to do is take.

I wonder, is it possible to create a license that would allow you to simply ban people who are being a dick about something from using it? Sure, it may turn away some people, since there's always a risk of abuse, but it's your work and as far as I know, you are the one who sets the terms.

If I'm not mistaken, most of the FOSS licenses (or maybe even laws?) guarantee you that you would be able to use the software even if the project later decides to change to proprietary license. But I assume you can simply specify in a licence "Everyone can use it, expect X.Y.Z".

Would that be legal? Sure, it would probably be pretty hard to enforce, but in some cases it could make for a pretty satisfactory (and petty, of course) C&D letters, for people that really deserve it. You insult the devs of a software your company depends on, demanding something while being a dick about it? Well, fuck you, no library for you and your company.