I'm giving up — on open source

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.

115

To be honest it has always been this way. Especially when we were talking about "Free Software", and open source was in part a way that it was free as in freedom, not free as in doesn't cost anything.

Of course the term open source didn't change anything, because if you look at the definition of open source, you're allowed to share it so obviously you'll be able to get a copy for free.

And uesst what, not having to pay is such a big difference that's what people remember.

5

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.

75

I've oddly seen people be more entitled to free things then things they pay for. There is now a legal entitlement for these people now though

24
With the subscription they can focus on the Pareto optimization. 20% of the subscribers will be causing 80% of the entitled asshattery. Drop those, focus on features, raise prices, keep the good contracts. This software looks like a good fit for enterprise spending tens of thousands to get a support contract.

It sounds like the repo is still up and open and they just aren't going to deal with unpaid work packaging it up and managing idiots whining about it? Good for them, I honestly don't have any complaints with this.

5

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.

58

Very well said. 100% agree - my projects are hobbies that allow me to contribute back for the many OSS I use, with the added bonus of helping me learn/retain knowledge of languages.

9
I appreciate your attitude about dealing with people. And the other stuff too.

5
Good thoughts. Did you follow the link to thread that was the tipping point for the blog author? The thread creator was very rude (according to, due to his own mental health situation). We all have different levels of tolerance and patience, but I can totally see why the blog author would be fed up after such a comment, if things were already stressful.

2
- Yes, I've just reread it, and while I completely disagree with the issue creator's attitude, he does have a point:
  
  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
  
  I haven't verify if this is true of not, but this is just not necessary. If the author stops providing pre-built binary for newer release versions, so be it. But I think it is a little too much aggressive from the author to delete old release versions as well.
  
  1

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.

45

And they justified with

I'm having a mental health crisis right now. What I said was wrong, I could not see that a few days ago. Take whatever you want from that. I am sorry. Please stop piling on now that I have removed everything. I am seriously ill and need to stop being involved in anything for several months.

(Leaving the end out as it can be triggering, talking about death)

I don't know what to make of this.

14
- Sounds like they're going through some shit and using toxic online interactions in an effort to try to ameliorate their internal struggles. It reminds me of a wounded animal lashing out.
  
  Doesn't justify them, but it does give more context so people can respond accordingly.
  
  9
- TBH I felt this is something they made up once it got more attention. If they had felt remorse, they might have come back to apologise or correct their mistake, sometime in the past two weeks I guess.
  
  Who knows maybe they are really ill. Maybe they just made everything up.
  
  5
Permanently Deleted

-6
- Then FOSS is not for you. Stop using it.
  
  -3

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

What kind of psycho fucking does this.

40

You have no idea. I once did an open source library that became somewhat popular and shit like that made me give it away to a consulting company that will happily attach a quote to the bullshit requests.

As in my case it was a library I also got the university students demanding I do their homework for them, which is another delightful group.

29
- Unfortunately, college kids are still very much kids, even if they're over 18. Which means a lot of them are dicks.
  
  .....I fucking hate teenagers.
  
  2
Apparently Mac users.

12

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

37

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.

34

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.

28

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.

28

Is that contract copyrighted?

1
- Is that contract copyrighted?
  
  6

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...

21

This shouldn't be the case. Offering the source code of a project to the world is extra work and an act of kindness. We should reward it in kind.

40
- We definitely should reward it, and respect it. But people.are assholes, and that's not a fixable problem
  
  17
- Offering the source code of a project to the world is extra work and an act of kindness. We should reward it in kind.
  
  We should have the option to reward it. We shouldn't be harangued for not.
  
  Disclosure: I maintained a well-used piece of software for about 10 years, and contributed to other projects as time permitted. I never, ever, wrote a single line of code or email expecting money for any of it. I went into it as a spare-time thing and I stopped when that ran out. I have no compassion for people who just magically expected a wealth of ready donations for whatever they produce. It's entirely naive. It's like the beggar yelling at you for not dropping a twenty into the cup.
  
  2

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 👍

18

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

18

I know a lot of companies even if using your OSS won't pay for bug fixes etc. It's really sad.

8
As shown by a Microsoft employee opening a bug for FFPEG for issues with Teams...

Maybe fix it yourself and contribute or donate to the cause?

1

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.

17

I sincerely hope they can make a living from their project

Or someone will fork it and put some time in.

1

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

17

Good that this developer speaks up. The recent XZ backdoor story is

Is unrelated. XZ is about burnout. This is about some guy saying "I did this thing for free. Where's my money?"

0

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.

17

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.

16

What kind of industry or type of solution do those projects solve? That can be a big factor too.

4
At that point, you've become a business. So yeah, you need skill to fundraise.

I think opensource software should always be dual-license. One FOSS for personal use, and an aggressively limited license for commercial use.

Fuck the companies, they will always take and never give anything back. They won't give you money anyways, so might as well shut them down.

4
- I mean if you want to live off your work, then of course you're a business.
  
  Or if you want to get money without all the fundraising hassle, get a salaried job.
  
  Basically you want to work in open source on whatever you want, not have to listen to users, not have to find funds, and still be paid for it?
  
  4
- At that point, you’ve become a business. So yeah, you need skill to fundraise.
  
  or a non profit, and not surprising running a business or a non profit requires the skills to manage a business or a non profit, iirc the software freedom conservatory and maybe the SPI say the can help with fundraising, but you need to be modest and consider you might benefit from learning from other people.
  
  Fuck the companies, they will always take and never give anything back. They won’t give you money anyways, so might as well shut them down.
  
  That's just factually wrong, for example most of the contribution to the linux kernel are from companies, blender development fund is a good case study for this (see how much each corporate sponsors pays)
  
  2
Very much. Thunderbird are receiving like 6M on donations. They simply know how to market and subtlety but assertively advertise their donation requests.

1

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

13

That's too bad. I've done some open source before but nothing that popular. If someone finds it useful then it can't be crap.

2
Sorry about your bad experience. Hope things improve for ya.

2

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!

12

Permanently Deleted

12

Why not dual-license?

Copyleft for true FOSS experience or paid option for companies.

11

This is a pretty good option, though I also think something like what aseprite has done is pretty good too (compile it yourself for free, or pay for a precompiled binary available through e.g. Steam) - from what I can tell this setup is fairly profitable.

7

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.

8

This is why I'm thinking the almost religious ideal of "free to everyone for anything" is probably a mistake, because there's a lot of FOSS software being used by corporations for evil things like shareholder profits.

We need to start licensing things under a "free for humans, insultingly expensive for corporations" model. "My code is free for private citizens, sole proprietorships, small businesses, charities, students, etc. and $900,000,000,000 per minute per seat for any organization with stock that is traded on an exchange."

5
- The problem with this is loopholes.
  
  What's to stop a parent company from starting a private sub company for IT needs and contract out the work?
  
  BAM there goes the anti stock thing.
  
  I say free for personal/private use but not for commercial would be a better license.
  
  Costs are dumb cheap for single seat but increases as seats goes up.
  
  5

Until the day FOSS development does not get recognised as a critical job by governments and global ruling bodies, FOSS will not carry over into the next century. FOSS is barely surviving due to passion, and passion alone does not pay for tummy, let alone families or creating an environment to encourage people to become FOSS developers. People hate donating, so FOSS will die and capitalism will win.

8

FOSS is barely surviving due to passion

How it started: passion

How it's going: passion

1
- It cannot continue on passion alone. Have you ever worked for a home/family with zero financial need and only passion? Does not work.
  
  1

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

8

I work in a state government and we can't "donate", but I have happily paid thousands for maintenance/support or hosted options. I appreciate when projects offer other ways to contribute.

4
- That's great!
  
  What kind of options, besides support do you think there are for things that cannot be hosted like command-line tools, libraries, frameworks, etc. ?
  
  Anti Commercial-AI license
  
  1

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

7

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

6

SOME of the points in this rant are valid. The conclusions are wrong because the context is wrong.

This guy wanted to get paid for his free software. Sure it's not free -- any more than the miniatures my warhammer-lovin' cousin painstakingly paints are 'free' for his time. Wanting to get magic money compensation, though, is wrong in both cases.

The public issue on github where people are slagging him for maybe expiring some old software; that's just stupid drama. Maybe he did, maybe he didn't. NO. ONE. CARES. They're just pissed at the apparent rug-pull and "buy a license" isn't the best way to be not-a-dick about it.

6

I do like the solution of the developer. Share the source code for those who want to compile and let those who want packages pay. And very good that the "shouting at open source developers" got some more attention again with this blog post. Too many people wanting to grab and demand but not give anything back. Time for a change!

4

There are two types of Open Source users; those of us who understand and live by the ethos of FOSS, and users who just want to use a software that they don't have to pay for and don't care or understand the underlying ideas behind it.

That second group is the group who, no matter how many times they hear it explained to them, will refuse to believe that "free" doesn't necessarily mean "no-cost" and therefore develop an expectation of "free" and decry that you're not allowed to sell your software because it's open-source, and even asking for donations is forbidden, when in reality neither of those things is remotely true.

Far more important than anything is to change the perception of Open Source to something like value ware; If you value the use you get from the software, pay an amount that you feel is fair. If they can't afford it, that's okay, but if they can, then the expectation needs to be that they DO. Even just a few bucks.

3

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.

4

"This is completle free to use, download, modify, redistribute, etc by anyone except Dave. Fuck Dave."

I don't know how legal that'd be, but i wouldn't even complain.

12
- @jnk @Mikina
  
  Legal yes. But sadly not FOSS. The Llama models from Meta are basically "free to use by anyone except our competitors"
  
  4
There is a paint pigment that is available for sale but you have to confirm that you are not Anish Kapoor (another artist) and that you will let Kapoor get his hands on the pigment.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/artist-only-person-banned-using-worlds-pinkest-pink-180961464/

3
You can certainly make such a license but I think it will hinder adoption. Just do a paid license at that point and refuse to renew if someone makes you mad enough.

2
- But a paid licence will affect users that are all right abd for whom you're doing it.
  
  I understand that using something with a risk of loosong access because you've upset the developer is something that will turn away a lot of people, but then again, I'd say that "don't be a dick" is a pretty reasonable requirement. The only issue I see that it's a pretty vague definiton, but maybe just limiting it to profanities and insult towards the contributors is something more concrete, which would be easy to fulfill and also enforce.
  
  1

Hate to see this, but there are definitely people who are takers and have the nerve to be entitled at the same time.

You, as an open source maintainer owe nothing to anyone. Never feel compelled to do anything in your project that doesn’t make you happy.
you should 100% be able to charge for your work. I applaud you for that.
There are more of us out here who want to support open source int he right way. Know that.
thank you for the project you made and shared. Truly.

3

I'm giving up — on open source - Blog