Comment by eternalban | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eternalban | Hacker News Reader

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Let’s discuss intent.

(I have contributed OSS in a minor way via a few original projects. I don’t run a business. I don’t have a dog in this fight. But imo ..)

If you start an OSS project, get contributions, then the thing becomes a hit, and then when money comes knocking on the door — investors want returns as it happens — and you then suddenly realize that you wanted a business after all. Then you will run into then “no good license” issue if you still want the help of free OSS patches, workers, and OSS monicker but need to protect business interests.

One the other hand, you can start with intent of making a business from your OSS project, and give non-transferable non-commercial license grants (of a foundational subset e.g. a single node graph db) to whoever wants to see or help you with the code. This scenario is (ianal) supported by existing commercial licenses. However this -may- limit the free flow of code and love and care by non-stakeholders of your commercial endeavor. I am not sure if anyone has ever tried this.

I imagine readers who've never babysat open source projects think that you "get contributions" and "free OSS patches, workers" but those things, for 99.9% of projects are 1-illusory, 2-when and if they materialize, usually more cost than benefit.

Patches are not the only contribution, although I am sure that while not every OSS projects get many, the most visible ones do get also Patches. Anyway whatabout the early testing, bugfiling, documentation and helping others to understand how to use these projects. A lot of people get involved with these activites because they want to support an OSS Project and often these, (especially testing early releases and Developer advocacy) are more important than a patch contribution for the success of the project and the chance for it to become profitable.

I've never seen those provide value anywhere that's anywhere close to matching the costs incurred. They get diluted by:

- bugs that are actually free support

- feature requests for things that some company needs, but won't pay them to create

- pull requests you can't accept, need to review, etc.

This is so true. I don't really want people to contribute because it takes more time to assess what they did vs just mindlessly doing it yourself. If I had the time to review I would rather implement the feature or fix.

IMHO it’s because we have no real way to pivot with this stuff, and you said it well enough, I just want to add:

In my mind, you’re either an OSS person who “goes viral” and maybe gets picked up or a large “thank you” contrib to your “buy me a coffee” bucket.. or you’re actually trying to make a product but need to “market test” on the old (but hardly ever used anymore) “shareware” concept. Free market testing and occasional PRs is not a proper path to IPO or venture capital. It’s just that you didn’t realize it when you set out, or you did and you’re “meta gaming” the lifecycle.

With a (to be invented?) license that allows pivoting, I reckon it can be the kind of thing that happens, and is a potential known to any product with that license.

I just don’t see it being popular.

Not that it works especially well for patents, but I could imagine a RAND licensing scheme for open source contributors that triggers when a license transitions from open to closed.

I don’t think it’s about it being a hit so much as the business dynamics have changed incredibly the last 13 years, when many of these projects took off. Open source as a business is incompatible with the Cloud.

This is an excellent point. Something changed. I'd argue that that however yet again brings us back to question of intent. There were pathways, RH for ex., that had worked as viable business models. But then cloud messed up with the well laid 'plans'.

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