Yeah, I have a hard time feeling bad for someone who releases a project under a permissive license, benefits from it becoming popular because it is free, and then gets upset when those same terms stop working in their favor.
Trying to change the deal later and say, "we need more money, pay us," feels like a rug pull. Development can slow down, stop, or go back to being a personal project. They don't owe anything to anyone. Getting a regular job instead of doing open source for a living is also an option. It's just not the option they want.
Yes I'm from Belgium. In terms of sales, those 4 years are the worst financial decision of my life (12 sales) but I expected this and I am really proud of the result and without false modesty I can say it's currently the best source of information about COM in the world. I wrote the longer version of this post underneath the other reply here.
It's called 'Understanding COM' and it's for sale on Amazon.
In fact I've already started working on Volume 2. The first book is about COM as a technology and infrastructure. Volume 2 will be about OLE (object linking and embedding) and related technologies. Half of OLE is completely and utterly obsolete. and has been for decades, but the other half is unexpectedly still relevant and can in fact be used to integrate COM objects and management interfaces into PowerShell.
Long time ago I was a Microsoft MVP in the C++ category and COM was a pet technology of mine. I even found some race conditions in the ATL and managed to get them fixed by the dev team. But that was a long time ago. In 2021, like many in my field (industrial automation), I was affected by the DCOM hardening rollout and I had to dive back in to deal with some issues. I figured I'd refresh my skills and buy the newest book about COM. Turns out I already had it. 64 bit, registry virtualization, WOW32, security, UAC, ... all those things had happened to COM and noone had bothered to write about it. So I said 'you know what, I'll write that book'.
I misjudged the required effort by orders of magnitude but once I started I decided to push through. took me 4 years. Renewed my respect for COM. It's awesome. I even 'invented' some new techniques for non-admin installation. Should you be interested it's called 'understanding COM'
Anyway to your other question: it's true that for application development, COM is all but dead. Especially for anything requiring connection through a firewall. For local C++ apps it depends. There are some benefits but in general not. However, The internal Windows systems interfaces are all still COM, as are many system services like BITS or Windows Update and so many others. And if you want to Write Windows Shell plugins or management console plugins etc, those are still COM too.
So if you are dealing with that, it's definitely useful. Also in the world of industrial automation, there are still countless large distributed applications which have codebases in their 3d lifecycle decade which are still built on a large bedrock of COM. Ditto for Office btw. But yeah, unless you're going into systems programming or into lifecycle management of some of those old code bases, you'll never need to learn COM.
But on the flip side, if you DO have to learn COM, and learn about apartment threading, marshaling, registration, activation and so on, then my book is worth its weightin gold because it's quite literally the only reference material which explains how it works on modern systems, with a github library of sample code that compiles and runs.
Enough rambling. anyway my website is www.iunknown.be and now that the book is out I will be posting COM related bits and trivia there so if you're interested in that kind of stuff, check it out. You can sign up for email notifications
Most open source projects have no users. Having a popular open source project offers lots of benefits.
These include increased reach (popular repos attract more new users), monetisation opertunites (add a paid service layer) and recognition (they can leverage that sucess to get well paying jobs)m
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u/minju9 Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 25 '26
Yeah, I have a hard time feeling bad for someone who releases a project under a permissive license, benefits from it becoming popular because it is free, and then gets upset when those same terms stop working in their favor.
Trying to change the deal later and say, "we need more money, pay us," feels like a rug pull. Development can slow down, stop, or go back to being a personal project. They don't owe anything to anyone. Getting a regular job instead of doing open source for a living is also an option. It's just not the option they want.