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Comment by jerleth | Hacker News Reader

The worst part for me is:

> Q: How long do I have to pay the fee?

> You pay the Maintenance Fee as long as you use the project.

What does that even mean? I built one-off apps for small businesses that I never touch again or maybe every 5 years.

Okay, at least paying perpetually for something I don't use anymore is out of question but if I open a solution for a fix I have to check all 80 packages what their current license is and pay them for the month?

No thank you, I'll rather pay for a commercial solution or use something free with a sane license. With a commercial offering at least it's opt-in when I download a new version.

For me that's basically a subscription fee for one-time download.

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> For me that's basically a subscription fee for one-time download.

Not a WiX user, but that's my issue with it too. E.g., AutoMapper, a popular mapping library for .Net recently changed their license from Free to a Subscription. We use it heavily, and may be willing to pay - however: we are still using the same version as of 2 years ago, because there are no new features we care about and there's no need to put in multiple days of work to upgrade "just because".

I miss the one-time-payment option for such things.

The problem is, if its one time payment, companies will just leech off of it indefinitely. It'd be great if companies were contributing, but its gotten to the point where you have to assume heavy bad faith from everyone involved

I am starting to think that the open source licenses need to be updated to specifically exclude large tech companies and force them to pay.

Big tech companies use open-source software primarily because it is free and unencumbered.

If an author uses a license that makes big tech pay, they will not pay. They will just not use the software. We already see a similar dynamic with AGPL.

It's easy to fall into a trap of thinking "I have several big companies using this software. If I had charged a reasonable license fee, I'd be making $100k/yr on this project." But, of course, if the project has started with this license, it never would have gotten to the point where several big companies were using it.

This is why we very rarely see successful GitHub projects that have asked for payment from the beginning. If a maintainer wants to make money on a GitHub project, the far more common path is: 1) release the software with a free and unencumbered license; 2) wait for people to adopt your software because it's free; and finally 3) once people have adopted your software because it's free, then ask them to start paying you.

In fact, in the early stages of an open source project, if someone opened an issue that said "hey do you want to set a norm of commercial users paying to use your software?" it would be rational to say no! You don't want to scare off big tech engineers. Better to wait until they're already using the software.

> If an author uses a license that makes big tech pay, they will not pay.

That's not my experience.

> But, of course, if the project has started with this license, it never would have gotten to the point where several big companies were using it.

That is very possible. We'll have to wait to see if any projects start with a maintenance fee then become popular.

> "hey do you want to set a norm of commercial users paying to use your software?"

My ideal would for the norm to shift such that companies think, "We're using this Open Source project, are we already paying the maintenance fee?" I don't know if that will actually work out but I know that if we don't try it will not.

The OSMF is my attempt to find out.

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