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Comment by LegibleCrimson | Hacker News Reader

I'm honestly confused why anybody would waste their time working for free to improve an Open Core project. You're donating your labor to a private company to improve their product.

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The real problem here is that the contributor (presumably) didn't give a heads up before implementing the feature. The maintainer also stayed silent for nearly 4 months. This incident shows how important it's for them to communicate.

Other than that, there is no problem contributing to an open core project if it gets accepted. The community gets to benefit as well. On the other hand, a CLA in such a project is something you need to avoid by all means.

The same is true of any successful open-source project, isn't it? Almost all popular projects are used by for-profit companies, regardless of who owns the copyright on the code.

I feel different about fully open source projects. You are working for free for the benefit of the company, all other companies who want to use it, and the rest of the world. I'm happy to work for free when it benefits everybody equally. I don't care that for profits benefit, because they all benefit potentially the same amount. It's a boon for the world.

With open core, you're working for free for the benefit of the leverage of a company to better position their secret sauce. It asymmetrically benefits the company more than everybody else. I only do that when I'm getting paid to do it.

What I'm hearing is that you object to cases where the entity exerting the most control over the direction of an open-core project has an incentive to restrict the project in favor of something else the entity also controls -- usually their non-open project.

It's a reasonable position, but I can imagine open-core projects that aren't conflicted this way, and open-source projects that are.

Exactly, I'm sure good projects exist, but that involves active goodwill from the company. The incentives are loaded in the favor of exploitation rather than public good.

Because you're using the product for whatever reason, and you really want that one feature, but you don't want to be stuck maintaining the fork just for that.

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