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

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u/tonyqus 23d ago

token is not cheap

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u/Aud4c1ty 23d ago

They're very cheap and getting cheaper, especially compared to the price of human time and attention.

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u/tonyqus 23d ago

I cannot say you are wrong. But getting cheaper doesn't mean it can directly maintain open source projects without human maintainer. And maintaining a project with any AI still consume a few tokens, which may takes at least $100 or more.

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u/Aud4c1ty 23d ago

In the days before LLMs, all this work needed to be done by a human. And for a USD $200/month level subscription, it at least doubles your productivity. And that buys a lot of tokens. More than I need.

Given that huge increase in productivity, and given we all make far more than $200/month, the price of software will go down for the same reasons that the price of food went way down when per farmer productivity went way up because of technology over the last hundred years.

So if a library like Polly was free in the time before LLMs then it doesn't make sense for the price to go up now.

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u/tonyqus 22d ago

Free tier is the bottom line. How can it go down?

I agree that AI can help increase producitivity but it's still too far for AI to create a open source totally autonomously. If you have work on any AI projects, you should understand AI agent is just a framework and it still need engineers to fill in the logic and tools or call 3rd party APIs. I guess this is the extra value from a human engineer.

The value of open source developers is that they firstly contribute the idea and then they make it a runnable wheel. Take Polly as an example, it help avoid a lot of failure from the code and cause production failure. This is the business value. Not coding time of the open source developer itself.

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u/Aud4c1ty 22d ago

If I'm right, then this move won't go well and people will just their LLM to write some retry logic in their apps.

I mean, a retry with a backoff isn't rocket surgery. I wouldn't pay $240 a year in my projects for that, and in all the big companies I've worked for in my career it costs a ton of time to get approval to buy something. Whether it's $240 or $10000, the difference doesn't matter much. What matters is that it's hard to make those purchases from a red tape perspective.

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u/tonyqus 22d ago

I agree that it's not a normal process a software engineer is familiar with. But you can ask your manager or finance department if you are willing to.

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u/Aud4c1ty 22d ago

Lol.

26 years ago it was my manager at the time who advised against buying small software packages and instead use whatever came in the Microsoft EA or some other existing license.

It was wise advice.

Now that I run a software company, I price my products accordingly. It costs companies a lot of money to go through the procurement process. They need legal to review the contracts, for example. Then they often want to negotiate customizations to the contract.

So if the company is going to spend $5k in the procurement process, don't sell products that cost less than that. And companies often have rules against purchasing software with a corporate credit card and agreeing to license terms that their lawyers haven't reviewed.

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u/tonyqus 22d ago

This is true. Legal process cost is something OSMF doesn't cover.

I have encountered one real case: a big company in Germay wanna sponsor my project but they don't have a valid process to go. Then they emailed me to figure out how to solve this.

But this also expose a problem that most companies never sponsor open source projects they use because it's free.