From where I left

Re:From where I left by evanelias on Wednesday December 11, 2024 @11:32AM (#42389505)

I'm well acquainted with open source maintenance; one of my open source projects has been downloaded over 2 million times, and another is imported by over 8000 other repos on GitHub. I'm not "acting like this is an odd assumption" but rather my point was to consider the economic side from the maintainers' point of view, which many people in this thread are completely ignoring.

As you said above, maintainers don't have to accept your contribution, and if they do, they always have the option of removing it in a future release. And if the maintainers use a CLA or other copyright assignment mechanism, they also have the option of changing the license for future releases. So why are you assuming you can keep using future versions of the product forever if you contribute to it and sign a CLA?

> Sure, and they could've kept it private so it only benefits them and/or their employer

But that doesn't actually provide a net "benefit" to the contributor, because then they have to take on the massive burden of maintaining a private fork.

My point in all this is that contributing to open source often benefits the contributor more than the maintainer, and yet people act like it primarily is an altruistic gift from the contributor which solely benefits the maintainer / product owner.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:From where I left by jillyboel on Wednesday December 11, 2024 @08:31PM (#42395190)

> But that doesn't actually provide a net "benefit" to the contributor, because then they have to take on the massive burden of maintaining a private fork.

Well yeah, that's the point. Trading contributions vs maintenance burden.

> My point in all this is that contributing to open source often benefits the contributor more than the maintainer

And yet they choose to do it... Why?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:From where I left by evanelias on Wednesday December 11, 2024 @10:09PM (#42395826)

I said it provides more benefit to the contributor than the maintainer, but I did not say that it provides no benefit to the maintainer. Your question doesn't logically follow.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:From where I left by jillyboel on Thursday December 12, 2024 @01:28PM (#42401838)

That's exactly my point: It still benefits the maintainer. So they benefited from contributors, then fucked them over later, violating the social contract (but not necessarily the software license because CLAs yadda yadda).

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:From where I left by evanelias on Thursday December 12, 2024 @02:46PM (#42402651)

Again, my point in response is that the contributor received more benefits (in the form of code review and ongoing maintenance) than the maintainer. We're talking in circles here.

As long as the contributor isn't a cloud provider, they can continue to use the software unimpeded under the new license. Their contribution continues to be maintained by the maintainers. The contributor hasn't been "fucked over" in any way.

If the contributor is a cloud provider, they can choose to enter into a commercial licensing / revenue share agreement and continue to use the software unimpeded. Or they can decline and use/create a fork, in which case any so-called fucking-over is clearly mutual, because the contributor wants to profit from the software explicitly without making its ongoing development financially sustainable for its original maintainers. That's parasitic behavior.

I must ask, have you contributed to Redis? Or are you just expressing outrage on behalf of other people who actually contributed to Redis and may not actually even share in said outrage?

If the latter, why are you so emotionally invested in this topic? And have you ever been on the other side of the coin, maintaining a widely-used open source project?

[ Parent | on HN ]