Another open-core project rejecting PR citing paid feature
github.com
github.com
>there will be a conflict in the architecture
Title makes it sound like they reject paid features out of hand.
I’m trying to recall a time in my career where I’ve heard this phrase and it was actually a technical problem. Most of the time this is a dismissive response that is more political than it is technical. And let’s be honest — we’re the ones inventing the architecture of the applications. If a feature is desired but it “conflicts with the architecture” then you figure out how to resolve the conflict.
That explanation seems completely reasonable to me. Why should they maintain 2 different implementations of the same feature, 1 of which they didn't write in-house? Why should they spend time reviewing and merging something contributed by a third party who couldn't be bothered to read or follow their CONTRIBUTING.md, let alone something that hurts their own bottom line?
If the rejection was actually because of technical merit they would have (1) explained in more detail than "conflict in the architecture" and (2) left the PR open for the submitter to fix.
Not sure why you're so up in arms about this. They built the project themselves; they get to decide what goes into it. People who don't like that are free to fork, and compete on their own merits.
Because they don’t want the feature in the free version even if someone gave it to them.
So when you invest in open-core, you don’t get incremental improvements as people collectively make an effort, like open-source. You get incremental improvements by eventually switching to the paid version.
Gave it to them? They already have an implementation of this.
How is it a "gift" to spend unpaid time reviewing and merging a duplicate implementation, and then maintaining it forever, even though it likely has different dependencies and configuration option names than their existing implementation? And then after all that effort, all the maintainers get in return is a pay cut, if some paid users downgrade back to the free edition because they were only paying in order to use that feature?
You put the effort into a PR, and it gets bounced due to conflicts with some other codebase you don't have access to.
I think that's what they call a chilling effect.
The feature set of the paid version is public information.
Surely authors already know this before writing their code?
In this case, the pull request author completely ignored that process and submitted a 400+ line unsolicited pull request with no prior discussion. All of the wasted effort would have been completely avoided if the PR author bothered to post a single-sentence issue asking if the maintainers actually want this.
As for a chilling effect, the worse one I see is maintainer burnout from having to deal with PRs like this.
Regardless, they are not obligated to accept any contribution that they don't want, for whatever reason, even if that reason is "profit" and "business model".
Perhaps contributing extension points and a plugin system? Would tooljet et al. say no to that? Modularity is generally considered a good thing.
If people care that much, they can maintain a fork, and add the features they want. If the fork ends up becoming more popular, it will end up with more contributors and become the de-facto main repo.
Yes, this potential contributor ended up having their time wasted, but they clearly didn't read the instructions for contributors, which asks contributors to open an issue first to discuss the planned feature. If they'd done that, then they wouldn't've wasted time.