Sustainable open source will stay a dream
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Damn
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.
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.
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.
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.
Then they started complaining that the image search plugin was not compatible with Apple Silicon.
What kind of psycho fucking does this.
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.
