> The Supported Source License is comparable to a license you'd typically find with proprietary software. What makes a project Supported Source, instead of closed proprietary software, is that the code is online, open to pull requests, and there's a free trial.

Can anyone explain how pull requests would work in this situation?

Does part of the pull request sign the contribution over to the original license holder? How iron-clad is that? I can just imagine how much legal headache that could cause if a contributor decided that they owned part of the software.

I'm also curious about accepting pull requests in this way. Implicitly, the project owner takes over responsibility. In this respect, regular open source projects benefit from a lack of "official" support to begin with: if the PR does something that causes a complete breakage at some point, it's considered par for the course and fixed in due time. If however, something breaks with commercial software, there is a pretty high burden on the vendor to fix it.

I have worked in commercial software for years. It's a constant struggle as it is to say No to feature requests (for various reasons: not worthwhile, very hard to support, going in opposite direction of roadmap, etc). The worst are from the technical customers who say things like "why don't you just.." but don't understand the other ways the software is used (maybe by their competitors) with which their change is incompatible.

I imagine it would be an order of magnitude harder to say No to a full fledged pull request, and there would be immense pressure to accept it, since after all, the work is already done.. except that also means taking on the burden of maintaining and supporting it.

Anyone have experience accepting contributions from customers for commercial software?