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.
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.