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A comment on Let’s talk about open-source sustainability. Parent comment

Re:Let’s talk about open-source sustainability by TAForObvReasons on Friday January 18, 2019 @02:42AM (#18937665)
Thought experiment: If you see problems with many customers, why don't you fund yourself or someone else to do the work? It would obviously save you time and energy dealing with each of the companies, and you could use that as a way to officially associate your company with the project. This is a similar calculation that happens with every one of your customers and every other company.

If you want a model that works, build your own open source projects or paid components around Apache Big Data. It's in your company name anyway .. open core, and it's a model employed by many companies like Sidekiq

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Re:Let’s talk about open-source sustainability by lars_francke on Friday January 18, 2019 @04:57AM (#18938222)
> Thought experiment: If you see problems with many customers, why don't you fund yourself or someone else to do the work? It would obviously save you time and energy dealing with each of the companies, and you could use that as a way to officially associate your company with the project. This is a similar calculation that happens with every one of your customers and every other company.

To be really blunt: We are basically busy 100% of the time and it would not economically make sense for us to work for free on major issues. If you look at my Apache history (committer on various projects, contributor to more) you'll see that we DO contribute a lot. But it's mostly minor stuff that can be done within a day or so. For major stuff we just don't have the resources. We could add encryption to Kafka at our own expense and it'd take a couple of weeks of development time but we wouldn't have any immediate benefit from it. Companies like Cloudera or Amazon would benefit though.

This is how I see it at least but this is very much a plea for ideas. Maybe I'm just set in my ways.

> If you want a model that works, build your own open source projects or paid components around Apache Big Data. It's in your company name anyway .. open core, and it's a model employed by many companies like Sidekiq

Yep, that "just" requires us to have a good idea, plus the free cycles (basically investing money) plus we'd now need to learn how sales work etc. and to be honest...we're not good at that. We're really really good at the stuff we do now though. It's hard to change your own ways ;-)

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