Some companies do have systems set up to pay OSS projects, but it's hard to navigate. I think a lot of people enjoy donating their time to OSS because it's fairly low-stress (until the above situation happens). I don't want to figure out billing and stuff when companies want my support, it's not a company, and that's why the article here exists. That's why this discussion is happening.
Very few companies want to pay for that, fewer still when in-house and third party devs are often begging to do that work if they'd just let them license the code as OSS.
Totally, I think you’re right, a lot of companies are open to paying for it if it’s saving money and providing value. I mean, all companies already do have a software expenditure budget for commercial software.
But I guess it is not simple to just put OSS projects in the same budget bucket as proprietary software. Companies have a special aversion to unexpected expenses. I’ve done business with companies that would rather pay a known monthly fee for all their licenses than only pay for the licenses that get used every month, simply because they can’t account for what it will cost in advance. Practically speaking, always paying bounties for changes would turn OSS into pure commercial software from the buyer’s point of view.
There are a ton of OSS projects that are supported by the author’s day job at a for-profit company. I guess I’m not convinced that if software is offered for free in the first place that it always makes sense to expect money to be offered without asking for it. If an OSS project needs funding, maybe it’s best to just offer it commercially in the first place?
I just don’t necessarily agree with the hyperbole that unpaid labor is “wrong”, because that undermines the initial OSS transaction. The software was offered for free-as-in-beer in the first place, and that is unpaid labor. It’s perfectly fine to request pay for changes, so isn’t that better and more straightfoward than not asking for money but complaining when none comes?
The problem is that you ask for money on OSS. Companies use OSS because it is free. If you try to force them to contribute or pay money, there will always be someone who has more passion than you to do it for free. At this point, just pass on your OSS project that is highly demanded but you have no passion for.
IMO, you're fighting the culture of OSS. I see that culture as "give some, take some". Where we exchange help and knowledge rather than payment. Adding explicit payment cheapens my involvement - and passion and creativity - because now, like everything else, there's an expectation of compensation. Even if I'm not involved, I'm now a second tiered citizen compared to "pro" packages because "if it was any good, wouldn't you sell it?". It taints the entire system. We have jobs for that.
But here's the thing, there are examples of commercializing open source software. Red Hat, MeteorJS, GhostJS, and more that I can't remember. These companies add value and most are appreciated. Your business model ignores this and feels like a "fuck you, pay me".
If I was you, I'd find a way to keep OSS exactly the way it is, but make consulting around those OSS projects extremely easy.
I think this is a bad development. The allure of getting paid for something you do for free can be too great. This may lead to OSS devs, especially those who do the work for free now, expecting extrinsic reward for their work. Extrinsic reward for work that once provided intrinsic reward can lead to cessation of that work, if the external reward lessens or goes away. A new type of dev may emerge from this who won't have the same values as the ones who do it free of charge.
I can see this support feature changing things, but it won't in the way you suspect it will.
Setting up a payment page and writing one line to the license, even if I outsource that one time effort, will be indefinitely cheaper than having my revenue at the mercy of some random algorithm which doesn't even take into account how important my software might be to a company and giving a huge cut to a third party which really doesn't do anything other than profiting of my hard work. I struggle to see the appeal for OSS maintainers.
I feel this is a problem of companies being cheapskates, not of OSS maintainers. So do not make it their problem. I do not make OSS for companies, but for enthusiasts, contributing to building cool stuff, students and researchers.
Don't really want a commercialization of OSS maintainers. Does not seem in the spirit of OSS, but a convoluted way to contract a single dev to work on your stack. If you are this big company, ping your developer advocate, set aside a budget, and have them go through your dependancies and reward accordingly.
What bothers me way more, is when companies take OSS and then do not adhere to the license. Not as in forgetting to attribute you, but publishing a patent based on your code and approaches. That's easy enough to kill your motivation if you are doing it for free in the first place.
If money becomes an incentive for OSS maintainers, then they will start replying to the emails they constantly get, to buy their extension or use their CDN. Your company bet the house on a poor Polish CS student for logging or useragent parsing? Your, and only your, problem. OSS keeps on working.
Most blog post miss a critical point in OSS software: OSS authors can't charge royalty for the use of their software, but they can charge money for maintenance of said software.
And yet most OSS doesn't do that. Almost all widely used OSS has some other revenue model (if any). Volunteer maintainers keep complaining about burnout, and yet they don't directly ask for money for writing the software.
OSS authors don't owe anything to users if the users are not paying back. This is exactly why all OSS licenses contain the pharese ABOSLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
The one thing I would never do is advocate internally for 'supporting' or 'sponsoring' OSS. Managers will just hear 'we should pay for something we already get free'.
The best way to sell the idea is to make it transactional. 'We need feature X. It'll cost us N to pay the core devs for it, or we can do it in house for N^2.'
Then put together a spreadsheet of those examples and send them up the food chain come budget time.
Yep that is definitely one business model that might work. So you agree with me that having a proper business model for your OSS work is the way to go instead of complaining that people don't send you $ out of the kindness of their hearts or some moral code that only the OSS maintainer is aware of.
It's all about market segmentation. If you price your software at $0, you'll end up with a large user-base (in theory). You can then start pay-services like consulting/support. Eventually you can add new product lines based on OSS with additional bells and whistles.
The reason this works is that once you have a large user-base you can get people to buy your services because you have now developed a stickiness with your customer-base.
Exhibit A: Hashicorp. People started using Vagrant, the user-based expanded. When they moved onto other pay-services, people followed.
The reality is that developers want 'free' stuff they can build with but IT/Ops wants 'pay' services where they get 24/7 support, consulting, etc etc.
No company will be fully OSS because no money = no company. However I can see many orgs support OSS as a customer engagement tool to drive their brand and get a user base that they can drive towards other products.
We don't donate to OSS software which we use, because we're legally not allowed to.
I routinely send key projects, particularly smaller projects, a request to quote me a commercial license of their project, with the explanation that I would accept a quote of $1,000 and that the commercial license can be their existing OSS license plus an invoice. My books suggest we've spent $3k on this in 2015. My bookkeeper, accountant, and the IRS/NTA are united on this issue: they don't care whether a software license is OSS or not. A $1k invoice is a $1k invoice; as a software company, I have virtually carte blanche to expense any software I think is reasonably required, and I think our OSS is reasonably required.
I would do this more often if OSS projects made it easier for me to do so. Getting me to pay $1,000 for software is easy; committing me to doing lots of admin work over the course of a week is less easy. Take a look at what e.g. http://sidekiq.org/ , which is an OSS project with a commercial model, does. Two clicks gets me to a credit card form. If I actually used Sidekiq, Mike would have had my credit card on file the day that form went up.
I don't think the issue is that they don't want to pay, but that they don't realize they can. Often, when a open source solution lacks some required feature, a proprietary one is chosen. Paying the developer to implement that feature is just not something that comes to mind.
Oss maintainers also need to provide 'commercial' licences that are no different to the normal license, except they come with an invoice. Some companies are happy to pay for free software as long as there is an invoice to keep the accounting people happy. A donation model doesn't work here.
Having to profit from the software isn't neccessarily that big of a caveat either depending on what precise wording that ends up in the law. Do donations count? What if you accept a bug bounty? How about a one time contract to implement a minor feature? Monetizing OSS is already hard enough that having to deal with compliance even for (money wise) tiny projects will make it impossible for many more.
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