If we were serious about funding open source, I don't think this would be as common.
If a developer needs a pay day, are we surprised if they take it from an investor who wants returns?
If a developer needs a pay day, are we surprised if they take it from an investor who wants returns?
I think in that scenario, it would be much more clear-cut that the responses would be:
1. Well that's a bummer that MinIO wasn't sustainable as it was; I'll just stick with 1.x forever, or
2. Well thank goodness this new company stepped up and is taking over maintenance and development; I'm willing to pay them to get ongoing support and having continued access to the web console feature in new versions seems like a fair price to pay.
I have some unsolicited advice: please don't open source something that you are actively planning to sell. Nobody will take this advice of course, because delivering your product as an open source project is an easy way to generate some leads and even get some free labor here and there. But if you don't want people to feel deceived, start with your expectations out front and magically people won't be angry at you.
On the other hand, I agree people wouldn't be angry at company B in this scenario, because they're not the ones who set the incorrect expectations to begin with. OTOH though I really do doubt "we just removed some features so we could charge you for them" would be a successful pitch as a brand new vendor for something.
I'm struggling to understand how there's even still a lot of debate on this subject because it's very simple, if you can pull off a sustainable FOSS project then the world will be grateful but in many cases it becomes very clear over time that there was effectively no plan, just a lot of hope that maybe things would work out somehow. Whatever good that is.
I think the pitch would be more like "we want to focus our more limited resources toward ensuring the core of the product is as good as possible, and there isn't a way to continue shipping an unmaintained version of the UI, so we haven't brought that part of MinIO into the community version of <new product name XX>. By offering it as a paid option, we hope to be able to sustainably maintain both the open and closed parts of XX over the long term."
With open source, I think what companies really want is an open source project that is maintained by people with stakes in the project, but complementary ones rather than primary. Helping pay for a new business seems like a worse proposition than just getting some major stakeholders to donate a headcount or two; yeah, it's expensive, but it's probably a better status quo and should nearly indefinitely cut out any concerns about rent seeking behavior.
Only contribute to projects that:
1. Have a Copyleft license
2. Have no CLA and do not require copyright assignment
3. Have enough independent contributors to make relicensing practically impossible
Bonus points if the project is governed by a 501(3) (not a 501(6)).
MinIO fails point 2. Redis failed point 1. Happy to hear a good example for failing point 3. Basically a (A)GPL product that was only developed by employees.
(Unfortunately I never had good experiences with MinIO, because it was just a bit less complicated than Ceph and the docs and admin tools much less mature and stable, and due to this I simply never got to performance evaluation.)
Also, github sponsors seems to work some as well. I enabled it last year and I've had a few gracious souls throw up to $50 at a time into my tip jar, though I've sent out way more than has come in (but that's ok).
I sure wish I could get my company to start contributing some significant funds though. We get a huge benefit from open source, but never seem to have the money to spend towards it.
What, and pay the people actually creating the value?!
Everyone's happy to get software in exchange for nothing from a project with only a handful of people working on it, until there's a problem in the code that is a real bear and causes massive vulnerabilities, and on a long enough horizon, that will happen to any sort of code running on machines connected to the internet.
If your entire business model relies on that code, it'd be wise to back the project, even with token support. I'm talking about less than cost of one team building outing.
I agree that it's a good idea to de-risk your supply chain. The problem is a lot of OSS is popular because it's free, and often there isn't a stable business backing it that an org could have confidence in giving money to. If you're just donating to a GitHub account there's still no likelihood that the project will stick around.
If MinIO were to require a license to run, I’m sure I could convince a boss at work to pay several thousands a month for it.
Currently, we are paying about 5000€/month for the hardware to run our MinIO cluster and 0€/month for the MinIO devs. If we now want to keep using their UI, the license costs would be €20.000,-/month. That is an insane gap
No wonder that we are slowly coming back to the shareware, public domain and trial demos, used to distribute software on 8 and 16 bit home computing.
As a society we should probably consider such behavior unacceptable and deserving of strong governmental protection. But alas, this behavior makes line go up.
they do not burn it to the ground, community has open source high quality product for absolutely free developed on investors money. Anyone can fork it, and do whatever he wants. I imagine if product is very good, and parent corp will decide to close sources, there could be some smaller business/consultancy supporting OSS version of this, or even MS/Google take over it as it happened many times e.g. ElasticSearch vs OpenSearch.
The saddest thing here is that MinIO is apparently not important enough for the big names that use it to receive donations / sponsorship funds sufficient to continue as is :-/
Downstream only gets to do whatever they are willing to contribute upstream.
We need more people looking to Jimmy Wales as an example of how FLOSS can work instead of Silicon Valley.
He's led the effort in a way that has enabled to project to stick to the core values.
Wales keeps himself basically comfortable. He's upper-middle class at best. Compare that to Pichai's $10 million in total compensation last year, which is roughly ten times the lifetime earnings of the average American. Wales is closer to the pay of his volunteers than he is to Pichai, by several orders of magnitude.
Most people are willing to volunteer for organizations or efforts where the people leading the effort are paid a cash salary. It's when people get generational wealth off of the charity of others that it becomes offensive, at least to most people.