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Comment by jrochkind1 | Hacker News Reader

I have worked on many many open source projects.

I don't think I have ever worked on any where there wasn't a single person writing code while getting paid by their employer. Is that enough to disqualify you from JetBrains criteria, do you think?

In email from travis support it was expressed as:

> Project must not be sponsored by a commercial company or organization (monetary or with employees paid to work on the project)

To me, that seems to say if someone commits code while on the clock, that is employees paid to work on the project.

That definitely disqualifies a huge number of open source projects, probably the majority, right?

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I agree. Any open source project that's reasonably widely used is going to have some team from some commercial company submit a PR to fix some issue they're having at some point.

Why would this be a bad thing? Jetbrains is not a charity, and their free open source license is in order to support people who can't otherwise pay for a license, not to make another company's balance sheet look better on their dime.

They (neither jetbrains nor travis) don't need to give anything to anyone, true, so I don't know if it's a "bad thing" if they decide to give free things to some but not others.

I don't use jetbrains, it was brought up by analogy with travis. In Travis case, whether it's a "bad thing" or not, I think it's a dishonest thing to be claiming you provide "free service to open source projects" while introducing criteria that would exclude the majority of open source projects — which you also used to include but have switched to exclude while claiming you're doing the same as ever.

So it's clearly their perogative to set whatever criteria they like, it may or not be a "bad thing", but it is definitely a huge change from what they used to, and is only actually giving free service to a very small slice of open source projects, while publicly wanting to take credit for doing otherwise.

We were denied a renewal of JetBrains' software because we pay several people to work on our open source software.

We then realised we didn't need the license, as the community edition has everything we need.

Our project is definitely open-source, but has an LF sub-project with a pretty decent amount of funding. We've been playing with the gitlab functionality, and was thinking it would be good to support a fellow open-source project financially, since we can.

But to move to one of the licensing models on their pricing page requires us to start to pay per-user. How many seats should we buy? I have no idea. Right now, if someone who's given one or two drive-by patches wants their own space on the project, we just give it to them. If it cost us an extra $50/year (or $240/year or $1200/year depending on our tier) for such users, what's the cut-off for who gets to be part of the project? It just changes the whole calculus.

If a company pays you to help maintain X then you can't use JetBrains but if your company lets you work on open source software, but not anything specific, during work hours then maybe you can still use it?

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