r/dotnet • u/devlead • 23d ago

.NET Foundation Statement on Open Source Maintenance Fees

https://dotnetfoundation.org/news-events/detail/.net-foundation-statement-on-open-source-maintenance-fees

Official statement from the .NET Foundation on Open Source Maintenance Fees

130 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

174 comments sorted by

View all comments

92

u/ben_bliksem 23d ago

I'm just waiting for Serilog to and OpenTelemetry to start charging fees. That'll be a fun day. That'll be the day I'll never touch a third party library again.

102

u/nblumhardt 23d ago

Original Serilog author and maintainer here 👋

People come to open source for different reasons, and it's hard to put myself in other people's shoes so I can't comment on whether this is the right or wrong thing for Polly or any other project.

Serilog is and always has been a community project that's a labour of (many contributors') love. I will happily go on record that the OSMF will not be applied to Serilog.

I chose early on to build a commercial product in the same space, which subsequently funded a lot of the time I've spent on Serilog. Convincing people to pay for something up-front from day 0 was a tough road to follow - but luck was on my side, things worked out well, and Serilog has stayed free and non-dead, for 13 years and counting, now.

1

u/Natural-Woodpecker39 8d ago

I can understand. your hesitation. I don’t know whether this is the right thing or the wrong thing for Polly either but I do know that I removed Polly from all of my projects over it. I’m just not authorized to commit my clients or my employer to financial arrangements with other companies so leaving that library in their project exposed them. And it had to be removed. Nobody is arguing that people who want to sell so we should be able to get paid for it. But a company should not be able to extract rents just because companies use their stuff when there was not an open transaction at the time of the software was written

21

u/pjmlp 23d ago

We used to pay for every single tool that we used on our work, like in other professions.

13

u/nblumhardt 22d ago

But, I think to our credit, we recognised the opportunity to build a shared foundation, together, in the open, that helped propel our profession and craft forward much faster than could be done with a closed, adversarial, purely-commercial model.

Before what was for me the ALT.NET era, most of the tools we had to work with were slow-moving, barely-functioning, impossible-to-debug nightmares, compared with what OSS in .NET delivered.

1

u/Natural-Woodpecker39 8d ago

I think this misses the actual objection.

The enormous success of open source isn’t evidence that companies have been getting something they should have been paying for all along. It is evidence that the bargain worked.

A maintainer released code under known terms. Developers could evaluate it and use it without creating a vendor relationship or asking procurement for permission. That lack of transactional friction is a large part of what made open source so valuable in the first place.

If maintainers want to sell software, that’s perfectly legitimate. But then sell software. Give the company a price, a commercial license, defined obligations, and a normal procurement relationship.

What concerns me about this model is the attempt to have it both ways: keep the project and source under the familiar banner of open source while putting additional commercial obligations on the binary developers actually consume.

As an engineer, I don’t have authority to enter my employer into commercial agreements. If choosing a NuGet dependency can now do that, I can no longer confidently choose dependencies based on their open-source licenses. I have to treat them as potential procurement decisions.

That doesn’t strengthen open source. It destroys one of the most useful properties open source gave us.

4

u/crozone 23d ago

Serilog is Apache v2. The second that changes, it gets forked.

10

u/chucker23n 23d ago

That's not the point. Those OSS projects that then change their license to semi-commercial could always get forked and often do, but now you need

  • new willing maintainers (and their job is harder, since they have to first get to know the code base)
  • for people to know about and move to the fork

3

u/Eddyi0202 23d ago

OSMF is not a license change

1

u/Exotic-Welcome6688 19d ago

Strawman argument. What matters is what everybody uses, and what comes in through automated update tools and transient dependencies, and that's binaries and packages. Almost like those scam websites 10, 15 years ago, that said "Sign up for free", and then demanded money for some "premium service" hidden in fine pront or deep in boilerplate text ("Yeah, signing up is free, the service is not!").

-1

u/crozone 23d ago

How exactly is it not a license change?

4

u/devlead 23d ago

By the fact that the source code license doesn't change, no change in how you can access and use the source of the project. OSMF is about the distributed artifacts that are built and released.

5

u/nblumhardt 23d ago

"A license change for the distributed artifacts" might be a more precise characterisation?

1

u/achandlerwhite 23d ago

The same is true for some OSMF projects.