Sustainable open source will stay a dream
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The self-entitlement in open-source has to stop. This is only one example of a maintainer quitting. There are many more.
And the shaming of projects who want to make money to sustain their projects also has to stop. Nothing is free. Somebody is paying for it in time, resources or money.
If you don’t like what a project is doing, or how they’re monetizing, don’t use it. Move on.
A universal basic income would better permit developers to choose to create collaborative software, rather than proprietary.
Move on or keep using it is the normal choice when proprietary software changes in a way you don’t like. Trying to make money is fine but that doesn’t make choices immune to criticism. If you value your software freedom then one aught to criticize the creation of proprietary software, even if you never used it.
I wasn’t implying criticism isn’t allowed.
But opinions on what somebody should do with their time and project are just that.
Feedback must be given in a respectful way or it’s not effective. That often doesn’t happen with open-source projects and until we change the culture around open-source, this is going to just keep happening.
Opinions ate like assholes. Everybody has one. Doesn’t mean its relevant or important. The number of intelligent people who confuse opinion with fact never fails to astound me.
The issue causing offence and collecting unuseful feedback is surely an issue in every project. Is there sometime unique or prominent when it’s open source software?
We can judge opinions to the degree they appear to accurately represent reality or achieve a goal. I can understand wanting to monopolize your work (without money survival is difficult) but if we agree to the goal of human flourishing then we can same some opinions are better than others.
Delaying security updates for those not paying sounds pretty bad
I agree.
Playing Devils Advocate it sounds like the options, for them, would be to stop providing a non-paying version entirely.
I understand where they are coming from but providing an open source version that won’t get timely security updates feels like it would be more trouble than it’s worth to use.
If they only want to work on a version that pays for their time I’d suggest they make the whole thing closed source.
From the blog…
Which I made clear I would not be able to fix without a machine to test on. So if nobody is willing to lend me a machine or sponsor me, so I could get one myself, it’s not going to happen.
You think anyone made a move? Nope.
Once I decided to take the investment myself, but charge for the new plugin, I suddenly turned into the greedy asshole that’s not giving away everything for free.
… and …
I’ll continue to work on nut.js, but updates to the repo will happen with a delay. New features, patches, bug fixes and security updates will be made available to subscribers first.
Open source owes users nothing.
So, due to these naive believes, I started to work on nut.js under Apache-2.0 license, because I thought that if companies and individuals alike are able to permissively use my software, they would also be willing to support me in return.
lol
“I gave my work out for free, no strings attached!”
Using a copyleft license instead gives me a chance to get access to any changes they make if they redistribute my code.
Going proprietary isn’t an option: that denies others helping me and denies my user’s software freedoms.
This is the comment that tipped the maintainer over the edge:
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.
Which is incredibly disrespectful in my opinion, and this kind of entitlement is what makes me weary of starting any open source projects.
I don’t see how this will solve any of these problems he talks about. If he thinks a few bad faith accusations are impossible to tolerate, he’s really going to be unprepared for the death threats devs in closed-source companies constantly receive.
The dude tried one business model, and rather than seeing the frustrations as a guide to make a better product, decided to fuck up his on ramp to new business because he thought it was a personal attack
Read the comment. It was literally a personal attack.
