“Open source” does not mean “includes free support” (2020)
raccoon.onyxbits.de
raccoon.onyxbits.de
A car requires maintenance, upkeep, fuel, insurance, certification (a license), registration, and other things. But a free car has a lot of value assuming it works. Even then, some people can't afford even a free car.
Dogs are also used as ratters, herders, and as protection for livestock from predators like foxes or lions (depending on where you live...). So much so, some working dogs can go for 50k in Australia!
Dogs require upkeep in the form of food, water, vaccinations, training and toileting.
As such the description "free as in puppies" is apt.
Have a good day :)
I am a dog person, for what it's worth.
Open source means that you have options. The options include paying the developer, starting your own support community with other users, paying some other developer to work on it, starting your own fork... and complaining on the Net. Any or all of those are available to everyone, all the time.
Thanks for putting your software out on the Net with an open source license. It makes the whole world a little better.
It's just working, why should we expect anything more? A worker can't do anything more and there is not even a commercial bait for her.
Being this far from the normal software maintainer behavior is of course permitted, but common courtesy demands that these deviations be clearly specified to users. There should be a “I DO NOT ACCEPT, READ OR LOOK AT ANY BUG REPORTS UNLESS YOU PAY ME” warning label on the project page.
> software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
Or the very common MIT license:
> THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED
Is that not enough? Developers providing support is a nice touch on top of what the license says, and I'd argue that even if it's normalized it should not be assumed, and we should do a better job to make sure that users of open source software know that any support provided is indeed an extra, super nice plus, not something to expect/demand.
Also -and this is my fave-, people reporting "features I want" as bugs; followed by increasingly shrill demands that I "fix" their "bug."
I also have to wonder how badly this affects his sales funnel? Seems like a good way to make potential clients look for another project or developer to work with. This kind of attitude would be an instant turn off for me.
However, I would let people file issues and would just let them sit there if they are not a paying for it. This way at least the known issues are documented and there would be less duplication.
Letting people fix their own problems is a good strategy. However, if you are encouraging people to send PRs, then there is a maintenance problem. Especially if some eager people decide to add major feature or refactor the code.
"Means" and "can" are incompatible. Either free software may mean free support, or independent and libre support always forms around free software projects.
Source: I used to make a living offering independent support for commercial software that someone else made and sold.
I was fortunate enough once that a big company used an algo I wrote and contributed a performance improvement in an area I'd had writers block on, but that was the exception.
I've been on tons of sales calls and architecture calls with companies and they always exclaim "Open Source" like it is a feature or selling point.
Nope, unless your company if contributing back with money or time, you should not use Open Source.
But even still, I've had to use plenty of paid/closed source proprietary solutions that sucked up a ton of our time. At one point the company was paying more than $10,000 per month for IBM Rational Clear Case and it was a hunk of shit that routinely lost source code. We had to hire a small team just to "administer" it (aka try to help us work around bugs and become experts in the CLI options and recovery logs so they could help others).
There are "open source" options that are half baked and buggy, but there are plenty more that are great polished products. The goodness of software is often not dependent on source availability.
Any software you adopt has a risk of requiring work/effort to use. At least with open source you have options.
I strongly advocate for open source in the company. I only consider proprietary when there isn't a suitable open source option.
A bit of context, my software is what I call a product framework, it provides the user system, payment system, admin system, etc that can be used for SaaS by Bootstrappers. Others may say it's a SaaS bootstrap, but I feel like it's more than that.
Don't moralize. If you want something, put it in the license.
No they can use, but the moment they want a change or patch, please pay up.
I believe submitting a bugreport itself is a contribution. I know it does not mean that the developer is liable for fixing it or improving it, but if it's a valid bug at least they should politely refuse to fix or even just ignore it and let it be open.
> Your bug doesn’t bother me (or my paying users). If it did, I’d have fixed it myself. When submitting a bug report, you are not working for me, you are working for yourself and the user community. The same way I was, when making the original software available free of charge (whether or not you want to do it is entirely your choice, I’m not asking you to). Does your bug report include a patch? If yes, then the problem’s solved for you, if not, then you are expecting me to come up with a fix. That’s a work order, here’s my bill.
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I'm personally in the middle; if the bug is posted on an open bug tracker, it can be a good way to coordinate the community to find workarounds and get a patch started. Also triaging a bug is work, so it could be considered helpful to say "I've tracked the cause down to this module/function/line" even without a patch.
OTOH, a Github issues is also a great gathering place for entitled jerks. and many an issue thread has become the HN/Reddit/4Chan punching bag of the day and now the project maintainer is expected to both write a patch for free and moderate / lock and clean up an impromptu internet complaining situation, so IDK. Open source is a mess sometimes.
Accepting/Ignoring a valid bug is just not too much of task, rather it is more work to file the reply as what you got. Just accept/ignore the bug report and forget, don't be rude.
However, the tone of the article somehow went gradually from "straightforward and honest" to "actually toxic" towards the end, and left me somewhat disinclined to choose any of this author's products.
Far better someone protects themselves while providing something of benefit, than someone getting dragged under by expectations of free work.
This only saddens me a bit because there are so many people out there sharing software that nowadays my meager contributions won’t be missed. However I do wonder how much truly useful software does not get shared due to these liability concerns. A corporation has to weigh the goodwill they get from sharing software versus the potential ire of angry self-entitled people who think they are entitled to free support and extra disclaimers beyond those in the license. Why bother?
The reason I did that was because I did not want the extra overhead which comes with "running a software project".
I do, however, run a Discord "server" which serves as both a news channel and a bug reporting and support channel. However, that has actually helped control the amount of demands I receive and by now users are aware that "I wrote Captain's Log for myself. It's useful to me and I package it for others to download and use too if they want to." - and that's the basis on which I release that application.
I'll also take note of suggestions on the "#wishlist" channel and if I agree that a particular "wish" is something I'd like to see in the application then it may eventually get added.
All the above, including the time I spend on looking at the Discord stuff, I provide on my time. I receive very little donations and only on a once in a blue moon basis.
He did. In two very good and explanatory blog posts. The software license also states that there is no warranty implied etc. etc.
If that's not enough information then I don't know what is.
If he only wants to prevent bug reports from people who read his blog, saying it in the blog may be useful. But he probably wants to prevent bug reports from everyone who downloads it, in which case common sense says to put it on the downloads page.
>The software license also states that there is no warranty implied etc. etc.
The vast majority of open source projects have this in their license and they still take bug reports.
The point is that his project is different from the default way in which most open source projects behave. People are inherently going to assume his project is typical, because most projects are typical. The fact that people do this doesn't mean they're clueless; it means that he isn't communicating well. He shouldn't expect other people to treat his project like an atypical one unless he says, front and center, that it's atypical.
The issue seems to be, these aren't true bug reports but support tickets pretending to be otherwise. The creator also mentions docs. If people try to save time (i.e., time is money) and don't read the docs but they want support. Well, there should be a fee for that. As we all know, ultimately, nothing is free.
This includes lodging a ticket at $50 or whatever (for time for triage) - and then developers can add a price to action a ticket if they choose. The developer could also refund the ticket fee if it's a truly valuable bug reports. Github UI should make this as frictionless as possible.
This would make it alright for users wanting support rather that adding bug reports, plus provide the much lamented missing income stream for open source. It would also have the effect of winnowing the incredible bulk of open source to emphasize truly useful projects, that people are willing to pay some dollars for.
Obviously there's issues, such as not all economic level countries could participate, and surely others. Yet it seems to be a solution for multiple of of the commonly expressed pain points around open source.
Do any of you have an archive link?
1) Developers should be presented with a refined list of support requests relevant to development in a format that they can act upon.
2) It should be made convenient for users to interact and discuss the software. If numbers are not sufficient to build a community the chat channel can be bundled with that of similar software.
3) The discussion should produce wiki format q&a, draft-bug reports and feature requests that may start out as copy past chat logs.
etc? ideas?
Is the "problem" with open source that it is mostly, only developers working on software?
Imagine someone who designs cars. He could answer questions from those learning how to drive but it would be pretty uninteresting. He would have to do a lot of it until something related to design would come along.
Users driving the application can learn interesting things from the discussion about it and may enjoy selfless acts of helping others. We know how to do forums, wiki and IRC if the community is willing and big enough. Smaller projects sometimes have barely populated mostly silent IRC channels. It should, at least in theory, be possible to combine those categorically.
Developers can already set all of these up but doing the whole list and maintaining it takes a lot of effort and it is a waste of time if there are 3 and a half users.
There is plenty of low hanging fruit. If there are enough low effort participants someone will properly fill the bug if the issue is worthy.
It is also motivating to be able to see users when a developer doubts the value of his effort.
Who knows, perhaps there are big ideas to be had?
Then don't have it! Set things up such that only after someone pays, you get notified.
Mine is only dedicating 1 day every 5 years to support. It scales well.
Pay now or pay later. If you can't support it yourself or hire/pay someone to support it, it's basically unsupported and probably should not be used for any critical function.
From a business perspective, it's sort of unintentional malware. It invades your systems and is just waiting for the right set of circumstances to bring them crashing down --- with the developer denying all responsibility.
Example: Developer incorporates open source that they don't understand and didn't write because "everyone does it".
Their employer may not discover all this until there is a problem.
That's a huge downside of today's "never more than 2 years" tech culture.
When it was made a managerial decision to pay 20% more to a new non-experienced hire than your experienced developer, it makes 0 sense to not jump ship for your own 20% or more gain.
Or at my previous job, management hired a headhunting firm. Contacted our developers at our company for a job at the same company. Paid $30k more. You can imagine just how fast devs were triaging from there. They lost hundreds of person-years of experience with that. Still are, too.
Loyalty is punished. Why would anyone be loyal? I'm definitely in it for the money and benefits. The moment you screw me, I'm gone.
But I stayed at a company for 27 years, and never regretted it. This was because of the company, and what I got from the job (and also, what I didn't get).
What I don't like, however, is people treating me with scorn, because of my loyalty, and personal ethics.
I have lived a lifetime of the very highest Personal Integrity and Honor. It's not been easy, and I have definitely made many personal sacrifices, in order to stay true to my Principles. Anyone that has worked with me, is very much aware of my principles, and also my strong backbone. Being principled should, in no way, be mistaken for weakness, or lack of character.
Just because the management are a bunch of dishonorable bastards, is no excuse -whatsoever- for becoming one, ourselves.
I will maximize my pile of money. You speak of ethics - and I will not engage in jobs which I believe are unethical. But it too is unethical to grossly underpay the people in your employ. But in corporations, ethics are downgraded to the minimum law in the jurisdiction. As for me, I am not a slave to a job. I show up and do work because there was an agreed-upon value for that work. The money buys my loyalty in the allotted blocks of time. No more, no less. When that agreement is no longer good, I renegotiate or look elsewhere. I am in an at-will state. They too can provide 0 notice to change the terms as well.
Maybe in yesteryear, when long careers at a single company were common, that worked. I've heard the anecdotal Dickensian rags-to-riches stories of "Internal mail delivery guy becomes CEO". Those days, along with proper promotions, commensurate significant pay and benefit increases, and title are effectively gone. (I'm sure there's rare places that do that. Again, anecdotal and exceedingly rare.) My, my colleagues, and those around me MUST job-hop to get those raises and benefits. Not doing so is leaving massive piles of money to burn.
And ethically speaking, making sure I assist in keeping my family in a good financial condition is of utmost ethics. Here in the US, the "social net" is abject from decades of hatred, ignorance, and utter lack of funding. The only social net I can count on is the one I create. As a white guy, there is no net if I fall. And there is no depth I stop at if in free-fall. I know that well. I see the homeless I used to live with when I go in town. And I'm intimately aware how easy my job can go poof and end up destitute.
So yes, I see the landscape. I know the rules. And I will job-hop and will min-max my time and money. I create my own safety-net. I live significantly beneath my means to create a buffer. My loyalty is currently purchased in blocks of time 1/2 month long. Unethical behavior will be responded to by aggressively looking elsewhere for a different neofeudal lord in which I can sell them my blocks of time. There is nothing unethical in any of this.
This is the system I am subject to. And I'm better off than many. Would I change it to be more respectful to humans? Absolutely. But in the end, I'm only 1 voice in 350m. And I can only do the rational thing for me and my family.
You brought your ethics in the discussion. At a fair reading of that, was an implicit comparison of your ethics to others. Else, why would you bring it up?
I can't talk about my own ethics, without people assuming that I'm being "holier than thou."
I'm not. I really, really am not.
But I do get upset, when folks act as if it's not possible to live an ethical life, and thus, accuse me of lying.
That's not nice.
Hell, everything I buy, used or new, I also maintain by myself, I can count the times I used warranty on one hand. Not the typical user, I know.