The awful behaviors you see from some users of a previously free-and-open project that went closed (ish) sound an awful like the behaviors of . . . paying customers in pretty much every industry.
What's interesting is that people who pay or people who contribute are, on average, nicer to us than the people who don't.
This should not be at all surprising. It's often mentioned on HN that you get rid of the worst customers by charging more. This is not peculiar to OSS either.
Some people is entitled. Period. They have the same attitude when they pay, when they get something for free, when they are right and when they are wrong. And these people are the ones that ruin it for everyone.
I'll have to clarify right at the top that I have not previously commented about Caddy, and I don't care about one cosmetic header nor the need to compile from source, those sound just fine to me.
Anyway: compare https://caddyserver.com/ to http://nginx.org/ and on the former you'll see way more marketing, logos, testimonials, quickstarts, etc etc ... looks way more like a product than an open-source free-software tool.
I always thought this was a weird trend for open source projects these days. I'm accustomed to debian, gnu make, nginx, apache, samba, cups ... useful tools with zero marketing and support. That's just how it used to work ... and frankly it still seems like it works better that way. A super modern website and easy-as-possible getting started stuff sets the wrong expectations in many many people who are not familiar with this world. They expect to do nothing and get a slick product / solution. They're drawn to the language they're familiar with from startups who get millions in funding and promise the world and then fizzle in a couple of years. That's not sustainable for open source projects.
Open source software is very useful and valuable and democratizing. Just the simplification of no per-user or per-machine or per-anything licensing adds a huge amount of value! The economies of scale of good quality open source software is super high. This stuff is really amazing and effective.
But the support does not scale. This is the one part you have to pay for with your own time. It could take years and years. That's the trade-off. You can't get it all for free, it's not possible.
You should probably be comparing to nginx.com.
I'll concede that Nginx does way more of whatever Caddy did that apparently made people upset.
But notice that nginx.org does nothing to attract people looking for a product, while nginx.com is an enterprise product, not a user product.
I just take issue with quotes like
> I do find it ironic that the open source community is so irate about having to compile software from source to customize it the way they want.
while the author does not realize how hard he was working to attract people who are not really the open source community.
So the least such users can do is to be nice otherwise gtfo.
(To be clear, I think the really awful users are a just a very vocal minority.)
Charge more. Like an order of magnitude more. You should charge enough that people who complain about price are firmly outside of your target market. If the thing is something you can target to large companies, you could charge an additional order of magnitude more.
(Btw, this nonsense is exactly the same mob behaviour Jon Ronson talks about in So, You've Been Publicly Shamed - which I highly recommend).
People get angry because they have hope for a better world. Now a lot of the responses he talks about in this blog post are, yes, very childish. I can see that.
OSS companies do struggle. I get that too. A lot of times they don't think enough about the business model before they start building their product. I agree, support contracts aren't enough a lot of times and I can see how their efforts struggled to bring in revenue. What they did is really no different than what RedHat did with RHEL .. that's why we have CentOS.
Today we live in a very different idea of what OSS should be. A lot of people don't differentiate licensees. So much of what is OSS are frameworks and tooling, and even in that space, big companies have worked very hard to get things out of GPL (Clang is a good example...and MacOS which has systematically removed any GPL code over the past several years). So much of our OSS is supported financially by the big players (RedHat, IBM, Google) and the dream of Linux desktops overtaking Windows on the consumer market died a long time ago. But that was the dream:
http://penguindreams.org/blog/the-philosophy-of-open-source-...
I don't think it's entitlement. I think a lot of people want to see real OSS; where devs have the time and energy to work together to make really good tooling. We want more projects like DarkTable. We want spare time projects that become amazing that people care about, not more half free/half enterprise stuff.
If a company fails to be profitable, we hope their tooling lives on in OSS. Making OSS profitable is super difficult, and something I don't even look for in my own big project (which is used more by students than in the commercial space).
And the big reality is, will this actually generate revenue for Caddy? Probably not at all. I'm sure they thought this out, and enough of them thought it was a good idea, but looking at it on the outside in, it was a terrible business decision. I mean, what did they seriously think was going to happen? Would companies seriously start paying a fee for what they had gotten for free previously, when it would cost lest just to add a package building step into existing build systems?
Six months out I hope they publish a post on how this affected their actual revenue stream. If it helped them out, then I guess it was worth it to make that decision and I'm totally wrong and I have a lot to learn about business. If not, I'm equally interested in what went wrong and how open source projects can get a revenue model done correctly.
That sounds kinda like entitlement.
"We want" these things, but "we" only want them if someone has the ability, resources, and time, to do it for free as a "spare time project"? I would argue that's a world where the only large-scale software we can use comes from major corporations (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc.), because they have the ability to do "pure" OSS tools that serve their bottom line indirectly.
Also, "real OSS" is what we do and have always done. It's also what the Caddy folks do. The code is out there under an OSS license. This is the kind of attitude that makes it difficult sometimes to want to do any OSS in a way that isn't corporate-sponsored.
My ideal OSS world has a lot of independent developers, not just employees of the giants pushing their particular visions of the future. That's not possible without some level of funding, and since people don't donate, one has to come up with other ways to incent paying for OSS development. We've got hundreds of thousands of lines of systems management code to maintain...that's not a thing that happens merely for fun.
I think this is a major aspect of the issue. Users of open-source software have been conditioned by these corporations to expect a "no immediate strings attached" license and an almost commercial level of free support provided by salaried full-time employees. What these corporations gain from their OSS projects is often not immediately obvious and thus the public is okay with it.
Now when a smaller company tries to gain something from their OSS work in a more immediate way, they get a violent push-back with people accusing them of not doing open-source "properly". But the problem is that we haven't yet discovered the way to do it "properly" - when commercializing open-source projects works it is mainly by accident (well, or by superhuman marketing feats) and for every successful project there are a lot of undeservedly failed ones.
It's a signal that says, "Hey, we actually do need money to keep this going", for those who would've never seen or given a second thought about donation links. I imagine what they were thinking was that people who hold the project in a warm spot in their hearts would pick up on this signal and then sign up for a "plan". (And I imagine that since this is Go, a big chunk of those users are already doing their own builds anyway and yet it's entirely plausible that even some of these people would sign up for a plan just for the warm fuzzies.)
Having a publicized announcement and a plan to get rid of the headers is a gesture more than anything else, and only half a step removed from comments like the text that Marijn Haverbeke has on the ProseMirror homepage[1]:
> If you are using ProseMirror to make profit, there is a social expectation that you help fund its maintenance.
In any case, as former FOSS zealot, the fact is that pull requests don't pay bills, and for the majority of consumers there are zero differences between OSS software or just get a couple of pirated copies at the weekly bazaar.
Also even the ways one can monetize enterprise software work pretty badly in the consumer space.
Amazing projects require huge amount of effort, experimentation and time. Once in a while there is something amazing that can be cranked out fast. Very rarely.
That is why you see half enterprise stuff. You can't spare time 40 hours a week, year long, five developers (includes organizational and design and marketing work) large awesome project. If you would attempted, your people would likely loose real jobs (due to low performance) and damaged their families over it.
And, the really awful thing is that if the project continues, it'll never stop. Every once in a while someone or some group will get a bee in their bonnet about the thing not being open enough, or the authors not following or not understanding the license (as though the copyright holder needs a license), charging too much for the one little thing they reserve for paying customers (no matter how small that amount is...we charge as little as $6/month, and we still get complaints about price).
And, there's always a huge misconception that because an OSS project has a lot of users it must be making a lot of money, especially among the people who won't tolerate any action that would actually make money for the project.
What I'm trying to say is that OSS is a hard-as-hell way to make a living (I've done it for my entire professional life, over two decades now), and there's gonna be a handful of users who will make it unpleasant. I love it when I can build some one-off thing and just throw it over the wall onto Github and never think about it again...where I can take a "use it or don't, but don't ask for my time" attitude. Making a business out of an OSS project makes it harder to select good users (who become good customers), though you have to in order to survive.