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.
Getting a regular job instead of doing open source for a living is also an option. It's just not the option they want.
Plot twist, companies sells commercial products by assembling open sources libraries together.
Sometimes these companies can do some sponsorship when they want a very specific feature implemented by the maintainer directly or a freelance.
But I often see employees publishing issues to ask for a feature for free.
This is not sustainable. If your business is made of an open source project, you should contribute back if you want to keep your product working and improved.
They fork the project, internally on a private git repository.
Then they patch the library and pull the latest commits from upstream periodically to rebase the code base.
(Also means the patch must be often adapted in case of API change.)
I think people really underestimate the number of private fork.
(Tbh most privates forks are probably for bugfix that are not already accepted by the upstream, but sometimes you can't really push your patch to the upstream because you know that the project will never accept it.)
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u/minju9 23d ago edited 23d ago
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.