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Comment by cheesedoodle | Hacker News Reader

An OSS project that a previous company heavily relied upon, pleaded that they needed funding or would seize maintenance. As the project manager at the time, I told the R&D manager to start funding this OSS project. In return, we'd get maintenance and features that we otherwise would handle in-house. Roughly a 10kUSD/y handout from a Fortune 500. "How much do we pay today?", asked the R&D manager, "Nothing", I said, "its open source". "Then we will continue to pay nothing". So many companies take OSS projects for granted and as a once OSS core developer, I have seen many sides of this. Don't expect anyone to pay you for the work you are doing, and if you find your self not having the capacity to continue, try to see if there's any other maintainer ready to continue it for you, if not, even if it hurts, just leave it alone...

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While this plays out with OSS quite a bit, it's not limited to just free software.

You are almost always spending more on an early adopter than they are paying you for your software, but typically that's with the understanding that you are re-selling those solutions to new customers.

That hasn't always been the case. I've worked at a couple of startups where one of our customers was exuberant about how critical we were to their roadmap, but part of why they were so happy was because they were getting a sweetheart deal, and we couldn't figure out how to tell them no, or sign them to a more lucrative contract because the one they have is already so nice, they'd be fools to sign a different one.

And then they go pikachu face when we either went under or got sold to someone whose career (and probably no small part of their job satisfaction) was built around saying No if you were lucky, and Fuck you, Pay me if you weren't.

> "How much do we pay today?"

"Not as much as we'll pay replacing it"

This is the game, and people who don't like it still play it, which makes it worse.

Boss knew we were using our integration box for customer demos. I don't know how many times I explained that the entire team would be blocked by 1 pm on demo day, and some people would be blocked as early as 10 am, for want of a cheap box. I had to make a chart that showed man hours lost versus the cost of the new machine. Six weeks. The new server would pay for itself in six weeks. He said something sheepish about how he thought I meant a '"server" server', not a workstation class machine. Still don't know what he was thinking. A "server" server still would have paid for itself in six months, and he would have the luxury of me not bitching at him every time he forgot why almost everything that didn't get done on a Thursday slipped to Monday afternoon and asked me again about slippage.

Well, yes. But clearly, the 3rd party project is not the core business but would be if there was no alternative. The company would just develop it them self, if deemed necessary. The idea is that the knowledge would be retained within the company instead. The term "its free real estate" comes to mind.

The killer argument with OSS is to say that there is a vulnerability. Then customers either pay for the upgrade or look for other options.

This request for money was both too late (after you've been using the OSS project) and too early (before there was a concrete need). The latter is especially bad because if you haven't had a need yet, why do you think that there will be one in the future?

It might have worked better to treat the OSS project as a "free trial but we pay start paying after 90 days" from the beginning.

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