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Comment by constantcrying | Hacker News Reader

They totally have the wrong approach. The EULA is completely bizarre and the implementation even worse.

What they should have done is saying "If you aren't a sponsor we do not care about your issues." Right now clicking the download button is a violation of their EULA, which is probably something you want to avoid when trying to get companies to give you money.

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I disagree. The EULA is an extremely elegant solution to activate an organization's legal team to help their procurement team sponsor Open Source projects.

Keeping downloads/installation behind EULA seems controversial (with all the discussed pros and cons). But prohibiting (or even making it illegal?) to open an issue seems to disrupt how free software communities work. Of course you are free to delay feedback for e.g. 2 weeks (see free access to lwn.net) or not to answer at all or to mark such an issue and move it to discussions but not to limit feedback to your project in such a way.

You should read the EULA. You'll find it doesn't say anything about the issue tracker.

The EULA is actually a very standard software license that basically says if you use the software and you make revenue, you need to pay the fee.

Anything that activates an organization's legal team is a great way to get developers to look for alternatives. No one wants to involve legal.

We used to say the same thing about Open Source licenses, and that changed. The long-term hope is that enough projects adopt the Open Source Maintenance Fee, or something like it, that it becomes the norm for companies to support the Open Source projects they depend upon.

And you can say that will never happen. But the only way it will _definitely_ never happen is if we don't try... and choose to keep burning out Open Source maintainers.

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