Proton-bridge is a premium product you only get by being a paid subscriber. If it is open source, they should not be expecting contributions. One pays to make sure issues like this can be fixed, they don't pay to fix the issue themselves.
It's the same issue with support as a software company. We have companies paying us $10k a month who "want us to consider something for future roadmap if other customers would also value it" and free users who "demand we fix (expected and documented behavior) IMMEDIATELY". The problem isn't open source, it's free.
Charging money to fix something because of who they are seems unethical to me... Maybe it's just capitalism, which is usually antithetical to open source free software...
If they want it fixed, let them add resources to the project like submit a pull request, donations or charge people support fees for urgent bugs, which many OSS projects do...
This feels like a lot of work being taken for granted. That is why support services exist. You pay a fee and the developer agrees to fix things for you. Open-source doesn't have to be for free.
One perk of it being open source is that you can take your payment in "benefiting the world" instead of cash. You're given the platform to improve it if you want; expecting some other kind of compensation for addressing your own complaint doesn't seem realistic.
The example in this article is horrible. The author will not accept bug reports without payment for "support". I'd posit that no reasonable open source project has such a position.
Sure, without payment there may not be any expected turnaround time or immediate response, but being unable to submit a bug without paying is absurd.
I think building the stuff YOU (or your company) need for free, and offering paid support to build stuff other need is exactly how open source should work. If no one has interest in paying the paid support, I guess there is no business opportunity, and it's better to focus on something else.
The fixes do not require payment (which would be hard to do with open source software). What required payment was a type of support contract or membership fee for early access.
Vendors were free not to pay, but they'd only know about the issue when the public announcement went out with no advanced warning.
I havent really seen that many instances where this happens.
If you're paying, you also get support - in fact this is a very common structure for open source products where you pay for a service contract. In this case you're paying for them to do it and have the ability to make updates, but since you're paying them to do, they end up doing it.
What you are suggesting is the part of a greedy FOSS project. One that enjoys the external open source contributions, yet still charges for features in the software. It's disgusting and an insult to your contributors, unless you pay them all money as well.
There is nothing wrong with making money, but don't to it with sleazy tactics like this that put you in a conflict of interest. Charge for support or a hosted version, but don't artificially cripple the software. If you do want to go that way, don't be open source at all because you are just a leech on the community.
I would rather be able to fix a bug or provide a feature to software my company paid for rather than hoping they'll fix/implement it sometime soon, or building some hack around it, if it makes my life easier.
So, not only are developers working on open source projects in their free time expected to maintain and provide support for free, they're now also expected to pay in order to provide baseline security for their users?
If NPM or any other package repository introduced this, do you think maintainers of commonly used open source projects wouldn't feel obliged to pay up? Generally immediately after a traumatic event such as having their phone stolen.
Even if you never plan to update your package, you can't fix a security vulnerability without spending money.
So, for me that indicates that the problem is not that there is any service for making payments, but rather that open source developers who lives on donations, needs to be paid more by more people.
It would be cool if GitHub integrated with existing platforms and helped that to happen. Instead, they signal nothing about this problem and shipped yet-another platform.
They could have easily have contributed to solving the problem for real, but instead go their own way.
This post today is what is wrong with open source software. If someone knows jwe, then they should tell him that lots of corporates and startups WANT to support stuff like this.
But you cannot give a paypal link and expect donations. As a company, I cant do that. I need an invoice. Hell, if you can get a business account, I daresay you will get subscriptions.
At first I built Sidekiq as an LGPL project and sold commercial licenses for $50. Revenue was laughably small, but the response I got was encouraging: people told me they were saving $thousands/mo over previous solutions and wanted to buy the license just to give me something as thanks.
Octave currently offers support packages for which you have to write in to the maintainer and have an email discussion. Compare that with Sidekiq : http://sidekiq.org/products/pro
Its one of the best designed gratitude-ware page...even works amazingly well on a mobile phone.
TL;Dr Donations wont work. Engineers cant give an excuse to corporate accounting. Make a pro subscription with ANY "pro level" feature. I can get my accounting to sign off. And no "contact us to find out about support contract".
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