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Comment by lacker | Hacker News Reader

I empathize with the sentiment, but if you want to get paid for your open source work, surely it would work better to set up a Patreon and point people to it, rather than write "send me a six figure contract or fork this!" in a GitHub issue.

It's also weird to use a license that explicitly lets Fortune 500 companies use the code for free, and then write that you don't want them to do so in the issue. Just change the license if you don't want to license it freely to big companies!

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> Just change the license if you don't want to license it freely to big companies!

Marak doesn't want to prevent big companies from using his (?) code, he's saying that he won't support them for free anymore. Read the Github issue again, carefully.

I find that those companies that add issues and support requests _ought_ to have the decency to also donate to him.

But, I guess, companies don't have any decency to donate unrequested, so maybe he should put up some sort of notice to request payment for any work they request from him. Oh, wait...

There's also probably distance between the arm of the company that donates to open source and the developers who are opening issues when they spot a bug. And that distance probably gets longer for companies with the most money to donate too.

This is not exactly so. Those developers who are opening issues belong to a team, that team has access to a budget. If the company has a lot of money, as you say, they themselves have some say over where this budget gets spent.

And they can use that budget to pay an invoice from an approved vendor. (Beyond something small that can be put on an expense report.)

About your first point, I've had people open issues on one of my Github projects, asking for new features. I then politely replied "I currently don't do free support for this project. If you have a budget, then I can make time. Let me know."

For me, this is the best way. It's clear and states that the ball is in their court.

I think this is a great approach

He's not complaining about use, he's complaining about support.

This is not a licensing issue.

He is frustrated that companies that use his software for their business raise support and feature requests and expect him to work on them for free again and again.

Do they really expect him to work on them?

I'm 100% sure they know that open source doesn't guarantee that and that he's well within his rights to ignore their support requests if he feels like doing something else.

It's not about organizations _demanding_ that you do work for them for free, it's the constant _expectation_ of it. I experience it myself quite often where users of my software ask about timelines for bug fixes or new features, but very rarely offer to chip in and certainly never to sponsor the work.

Of course these organizations have no way to force me to do anything, but it is emotionally draining to constantly have people expect you to.

I would be happy if somebody asked for timelines for feature requests, because it would mean that I have the option to extract money by prioritizing those features. Just make the companies bid against eachother, writing a bidding system (maybe second price auction for a work point where you set the number of work points needed for a feature) is really easy.

I already offer both sponsorship as well as tailored consulting, but I haven't found any success in trying to sell that in response to issues. The moment I mention that I can provide commercial support, they tend to become silent. Maybe it's viable if you have a truly massively successful product like Redis or something, but it hasn't been for me at least.

I'm really sorry about that. Still, probably every successful open source project should offer the commercial support by default, I feel like that's the best way to change the culture.

I wonder where this expectation comes from? Is it because of high quality free as adware/spyware commercial software? Or the way development centered around repository name and we do not use forks?

I treat open source as a gift. It allows modifications, it allows forks, what's wrong with people?

If you read the thread there is a link to a tweet. He had an apartment fire and lost just about everything. That is one of the things that is motivating this.

It makes complete sense to make a case in a project where there are a lot of requests for work and many companies using it.

I think a better approach is make some of the corporate users making requests admins on repo and take a break from the project. Companies would rather not maintain a private fork, but there are ways other than saying "pay up" to get them involved.

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