robmensching

Yep, and now you have about half a million lines of code* to maintain as well. Have fun with it!*

* Last count the WiX Toolset had 589,719 loc but 444,936 if you skip comments and whitespace.

* This is the point, maintaining successful (and often non-trivial) projects requires a good bit of work.

You can pay annually. GitHub Sponsors allows that.

Yes! Exactly. You're not alone with this sentiment. :)

There are models out there like this. Look around the term "Fair Source" and I think you'll find them.

This right here is the bottom line.

The OSMF's goal is to keep the software FOSS and the maintainers involved.

It sounds like you maintain a successful Open Source project. :)

> I guess they're banking on their users preferring to get the binaries straight from the source instead of through an unaffiliated third party.

Yep. It turns out a lot of companies are willing to pay for maintenance but they aren't willing to pay for charity. The EULA is what activates the internal corporate mechanisms to make that happen.

Note that the package.lock file is not the place to look for your OSMF dependencies. That file will list your project's dependencies and all of their dependencies and so on and so on. You want to look at the list of packages in your package.json file. That will almost certainly be an order of magnitude (or two) smaller.

For example, IIRC, GitHub (all of GitHub) calculated they had 660 direct dependencies. That's still a lot but it's not 9400. :)

> I'll give the benefit of the doubt and assume this is just a difficult concept to succinctly explain in a short paragraph.

It is challenging to describe the concept succinctly, especially as there are lots of varied expectations people have about how Open Source projects work. I'm definitely open to suggestions on how to improve the text.

> Its only appeal was that it was free.

That was definitely its appeal to people who didn't want to pay anything for setup installation tools. But that definitely wasn't our only appeal or even our primary appeal. The WiX Toolset unlocked access to the Windows Installer in ways no other installation build tool does. If you didn't need that power then there were absolutely a lot of sharp edges and "missing features" to make your life easier. But if you had hard installation problems, those sharp edges were sometimes the weapons you needed to solve the problem.

> Rob Mensching was supposed to monetize WiX by offering $5,000/yr enterprise consulting & support services.

I don't monetize WiX for $5,000/yr. I monetize my team and my decades of experience building software installation packages of all shapes and sizes. With this "WiX Developer Direct" program from FireGiant (my company), you get monthly office hours directly with me to discuss whatever you want, you get SLAs for answers to tickets and guaranteed bug fixes so that your development team is never blocked. You also get an annual code review of your code by us and access to some high-end tools we develop. It is a high-touch offering and my customers dig it.

> I guess that's not enough.

That's not the case at all. The XZ Utils incident showed that Open Source sustainability is a huge problem and I was compelled to try to do something to address it. I don't think the Open Source Maintenance Fee is the only solution for sustainability, but I think it's a pretty good one for projects like mine. The WiX Toolset is the first project to adopt it because I need a real project to help work out all of kinks in the OSMF concept. Everything is working very, very well.

I mentioned this in another response:

> Our primary goal with the WiX Toolset was to provide access to the full power of the Windows Installer. Given the adoption by extremely large software projects, I think we've done pretty well toward that goal. We're slowly turning our attention to simplifying the toolset to make it easier to use for simpler projects. But that's only been a focus for the last couple of years, so not a lot has come about, yet. But the Files element is a huge upgrade.

There is definitely more we can do to make simpler things simpler. :)

> IIRC it was a project under the Office organization originally.

I worked in Office in 1999 when I created WiX but it definitely was not an "Office project". It wasn't until I left Office for project in Windows Server that Office adopted the WiX Toolset (to replace their custom system). The interaction with Office was always interesting.

> I've got a feeling Microsoft doesn't want to support it anymore because they see it as completely legacy today.

I think that's probably fair. The problem is that nobody has created an installation technology that is as fully featured as the Windows Installer. There are a lot of warts to the Windows Installer. It was designed to support floppy disks for goodness sake, but they were the last team IMHO that took the installation problem seriously. That's why MSI hasn't been replaced in 25 years.

> WiX toolkit is just a reflection of the complex legacy of the old terrible MSI output format.

Our primary goal with the WiX Toolset was to provide access to the full power of the Windows Installer. Given the adoption by extremely large software projects, I think we've done pretty well toward that goal. We're slowly turning our attention to simplifying the toolset to make it easier to use for simpler projects. But that's only been a focus for the last couple of years, so not a lot has come about, yet. But the Files element is a huge upgrade.

My experience is that FOSS is being destroyed by entitled consumers.

Note: I'm not saying you're an entitled consumer, but I interviewed many maintainers of successful Open Source projects. The number one issue for all of them was entitled consumers.

Creating a private distribution point and private issue tracker definitely would be an option, and it would make enforcement much easier. But I believe it would also make us more distant from the community. I really wanted to create a system where the Open Source project can stay the same and be sustainable at the same time.

If the OSMF takes off, I could definitely see something like this taking off.

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.

Yeah, the build system integration was always one of the core benefits provided by the WiX Toolset. I know you're not working with MSI any longer, but in recent versions of WiX Toolset we _finally_ nailed down how to include files in the .wxs file using the new `Files` element in a way that wouldn't break other MSI features (like patching).

Honestly, thus far it's been a relative breeze. I expected the need to work out "bugs" as the idea is new. My hope is that after we address the bulk of the issues that actual consumers have raised about the OSMF, it'll be relatively trivial for other projects to pick up in the future.

Note: A few Open Source projects have already added the OSMF. I've not yet followed up to see how it is going for them.

Heh, funny. My goal was to funnel questions and comments into a single location: the Discussion forum.

Oh, snap! That's bad. It's fixed (thanks to a random contributor :)

No. Not really. There are 406 forks, and ~10 were created in the last 5 months. The other people on this thread are more correct.

Yes! There are many Open Source projects my company depends on (like Astro, Vue, and Vite for our web sites) that I would love to pay a Maintenance Fee to encourage the maintainers to keep on keeping on. For all Open Source projects that we depend on and accept sponsors, we do pay the $10 "fee" even if they don't require it.

100%. We're still learning here. I also don't expect every project to choose the same policy on how they tackle issues/PRs when requiring an Open Source Maintenance Fee.

The window was definitely smaller than I would consider ideal. But the OSMF only applied to WiX v6 (released in April) and later. So, all the older versions would not be impacted.

Also, the timing was never raised as an issue by anyone in the community. If there had been significant pushback, I would have definitely re-evaluated the timing.

The launch went really well though.

Absolutely true, but that isn't what happened (at least, not yet). Most companies found the fee reasonable and worth it to have us maintain the project and not have to fork it.

No. A maintainer is someone who maintains the project. Fixing a bug is a great contribution and makes you a contributor to the project. But you need stick around the project for a while, fixing issues that keep the project running and doing tasks that aren't necessarily required for your use of the project to become a maintainer.

We're still working through the best way to talk about issues and PRs. This is an area where I expect maintainers to differ in how they apply the OSMF (every maintainer I've spoken to is 100% behind requiring payment for binaries).

I wholly agree with the sentiment of your comment and we're still learning.

Note: At this time, my project (WiX Toolset) does not require the OSMF for PRs. If there is a README that says we do, then I probably need to fix it.

> It looks a bit similar to the RedHat model

Yes, very good recognition. The Open Source Maintenance Fee follows several of the paths RedHat paved long ago.

> This may give CTOs an easy way to expense such support

I'm finding it actually gives the CTOs (or someone a bit lower in the chain) the _requirement_ to pay like they always wanted to before. Said another way, in the past, many devs/leads/managers would say, "Oh, I'd like to sponsor this project but I can't get through procurement." With the OSMF, now they have the forcing function to help them through. This is not hypothetical, I've had companies tell me exactly this.

> becoming a GitHub sponsor is more involved than many would like;

GitHub Sponsors is great... except for a few very real cases where it is not. This is on my radar to improve over time.

> As an open source project no one is forcing you to maintain it.

Absolutely true. For maintainers willing to abandon their project because they tire of maintaining it, this is a totally viable alternative. Just ignore everything you don't want to do.

However, the maintainers I know care deeply about their project and making it useful. However, when their project becomes successful, the scales tip, and maintenance becomes a real burden. They could just walk away or ignore things that are failing. Or they could set up a Maintenance Fee and those making money using the project's binary outputs can help offset that burden.

It's one more tool in the Open Source Sustainability toolkit.

> The sponsorship seems to introduce a business model around what is FOSS, then it’s not FOSS anymore.

That's not true. I worked very hard with our lawyers to make everything copasetic with OSS and FOSS.

> I think the outrage is unwarranted.

I've seen no outrage. Actually, I've seen quite a bit of support for the idea, I've heard a number of good clarifying questions, I've a few complain that this is bad for OSS or something. It's been surprisingly great actually. :)

> This can make it harder to recruit further contributors as there is a two-clays system of contributors.

We'll see. I haven't seen any reduction in contributions (not that the project gets lots of contributions because we're the same as every other Open Source project, most consumers just consume). Also, note that the fee is just for maintenance. I've seen near 0% contribution rate for all Open Source projects to "maintenance chores". Those just don't fall into the "scratch your own itch" class of problems.

> Accepting money make sit a business transaction, if I accept somebody's money they have demands towards me. Then I got to work on it.

True, but I've been committed to my project for over 25 years and I want to continue to improve the project. The fee has really helped keep that motivation up (aka: sustainable). The reaction has been mostly positive which is also a plus. :)

> But of course the volunteer free model has sustainability issues ...

Agreed. I think the OSMF is a good way to tackle exactly that issue.