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Comment by ToFab123 | Hacker News Reader

I work on Enterprise projects and we rarely (never) contribute back financially, because we cannot for practical reasons.

It is simply not possible for us to add a "donation" cost to our projects. That will not get past accounting.

A license, on the other hand, we would have no issues purchasing that.

We purchase (expensive) licenses to proprietary software all the time. We could and would do the same for the open source software, we use, but without being able to purchase a license, there really isn't any practical way of doing that.

Free for everyone, except for enterprise production environments, would work for us. As long as we get a license key and an invoice.

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> I work on Enterprise projects and we rarely (never) contribute back financially

I work on Enterprise projects and we almost always buy support contracts, for both paid-license and open-source software, if they are available; you don't need creative licensing models to get enterprise to pay for open source software, you just need to provide an opportunity to pay to have a live person respond to and manage issues for enterprise customers.

I agree, and yes, we do the same when that option is available.

Enterprise companies pay for "support" all the time. It's usually utterly pointless and very expensive annual fee that lets you enter a support ticket.

Enterprise companies also don't like to run "unsupported" software. So there is definitely an opportunity here.

It's just hard to "scale" across lots of individual open source maintainers/contributors who as individuals are unlikely to be able to keep SLA minimums, support query timelines (always answer in 24 hours), other such things that help corporate accountants and lawyers sleep at night. It also doesn't quite scale if those corporate accountants and lawyers have to sign and pay for O(N*M) such support contracts for the direct and indirect open source dependencies of the company's software.

If there is an opportunity here, it's most likely in collective effort. An open source guild/union could provide a support pool/cohort of contributors to cover 24/7/365 or what have you support agreements, an insurance pool for SLA guarantees broken/fees, broker and collectively bargain with enterprises for support contracts that cover costs and wages for entire direct and indirect dependency chains, rather than just obvious direct dependencies or splashy well branded dependencies.

What about a completely pointless "support the project" license? So you basically chip in for the maintenance, but don't get any additional rights?

Doesn’t make it past accounting.

What if it's a support contract that entitles you to a response to support requests on the basis of 'in less than twenty-four hours' as opposed to the usual 'I might respond on a best effort basis if I have time, but no promises'? Would that make it past accounting?

Yes, but:

1. Do open source maintainers actually want to commit to that?

2. What if the response is "Yes, we don't support that and don't plan to?" and the company feels this doesn't qualify as enough support and causes a headache.

3. If the purchaser knows what they're getting into, what's to say their successor also does?

What would such a license look like? Anyone know of examples?

WinRar, maybe. It is an example of a software when you dont really need a license, but you can buy one if you desire.

https://www.win-rar.com/winrarlicense.html?&L=0

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