I think quite a bit of the change has to come from the OSS community and maintainers. Bluntly, there’s a value pie to be cut, and if we persist in saying “Pie cutting is beneath me; some business should handle that, and I will keep myself aloof from commercials” then crumbs.
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I always feel a little conflicted here with my entrepreneur hat on. When I was running a company I sent $X0k to OSS projects I used, usually after educating them what they’d need to successfully invoice a company.
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And I’ll admit to a little bit of “If my accountant made a considered decision to just do my taxes for free I’d probably say ‘Well, you’re a professional, clearly you have thought that through’ but I’m fixing an OSS dev’s business at expense of mine due to presumed incapacity.”
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I would like our community to develop and replicate the social technology it takes to turn being an OSS maintainer of a successful project into a viable career path, like running a SaaS company, being a startup founder, or taking AppAmaGooBookSoft’s shilling are all options.
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This was pretty uncomfortable to see. OSS developers don't have many avenues to get compensated for their efforts, and text-based advertising at the end of an install script would have been an unobtrusive way to do that.https://www.zdnet.com/article/npm-bans-terminal-ads/ …
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OSS devs can charge money for premium support, like any other business. That they choose not to does not mean that avenue is unavailable to them.
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From the outside looking in, it seems a bit chicken-or-egg to me; dev writes open source which becomes hugely popular by dint of it being free, popularity causes adoption by large corps, which in turn makes maintenance valuable/commercially exploitable.
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If maintenance had been commercial from the start, it seems to me it would have been far less popular, making adoption by by corps less likely, thus decreasing commercial value. ‘Solutions’ that might fix this, like dual licensing, seem to be frowned upon by OSS community.
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@zedshaw was ranting about this a decade ago http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/2009-07-15-ZedLamsonGpl …Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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