Thread by @AdamRackis

After a snarky tweet about this sort of blew up, I wanna write a few words on what I'd love to see open source, as commonly understood, become.

It's not uncommon for open source projects to blow up, and start getting used heavily in industry. For-profit companies, and the developers who work there, start depending on them to do their jobs.

This creates a massive maintenance burden on the maintainers. Issues start flooding in. Maintainers often get burned out. Sometimes they abandon the project entirely.

This is an awful status quo.

I want to see GitHub add functionality to also become an "app store" for OSS, so projects can, if they want, transition to a new license charging $ for commercial (ie for-profit) use

Companies tell GitHub how many devs they have & what apps they use. GH sends them a monthly bill

There are many, many companies that would LOVE to pay money to have projects they depend on get maintained more solidly.

Around this time people usually start throwing around the following counter-arguments:

"But that's not how open source usually works. OSI says—"

I don't care, & I'd never heard of OSI until yesterday. I care only about these problems being solved—not adhering to old traditions

"OSS projects should make bounties for requested features that need to get funded Kickstarter style"

Why? Why should they go through that work? Other than pining over old traditions of what open source means, why shouldn't these projects just charge for use? We'd all benefit.

"What if other projects start using / bundling other, commercially licensed projects"

Then the bundled licenses would get carried forward. One of many reasons GitHub would have to be involved, to automate this.

"What if, even after funding, someday the original maintainer decides to move on"

Then they could sell their project to someone else.

It always makes me smile seeing the OSS folks slowly re-discover basic capitalism.

"Open source is supposed to be about forming relationships with people..."

Just stop. It can be both. The fact that project X's maintainers are getting paid by for-profit corporations does not have to change how private (still free) users interact with them.

"It's bait and switch - a few project can't just stop being free"

Change the license across a version boundary. Version X and below is still free for everyone. Version X + 1 and beyond now has the new license.

"People will just fork the newly licensed version"

Who cares? Commercial users would be eager to use the seriously maintained version, **as would most private users**. Some anti-capitalist, OSS purist types might still fork, but so what?

"Don't charge, just get companies to help maintain the project"

Just stop. That doesn't work. We've seen it not work, so stop suggesting it. Companies usually don't have time to spare. They're not going to carve out time to maintain the N random npm projects they use.

For perspective, see this sponge carved into a smiley face? Creator made millions of dollars off it

Are you really against the smart ppl who make incredible tools on GitHub—tools which help you build cool software—making some cheddar for their trouble?

bedbathandbeyond.com/store/product/…

To put it more acutely, do you use any of these tools to earn a living for *yourself*? Do you get paid to write software with these tools? If so, exercise some introspection before opposing these maintainers similarly getting paid for their work.