Simple. Sensible. Sustainable.
opensourcemaintenancefee.org
Directly fund your maintainers with the Open Source Maintenance Fee.

I saw this some time ago and wasn’t really sure how to feel about it. On one hand it’s good to make corporations compensate maintainers, but I also don’t want to be forced to ask for a fee because my project uses another project that uses this.

  • nickwitha_k (he/him)
    1·
    17 hours ago

    It’s not free and open source. And it’s contrary to the F(L)OSS movement philosophy (cost should never be a barrier for one to use technology). Conceptually, it’s nice to try to get corpos to compensate devs but that’s not what this would do. Small businesses and individuals would be impacted while corpos can work around it.

    Additionally, it seems a bit ethically questionable to try to forcibly extract fees from end users when, increasingly, they’re feeling economic strain from the continued wealth hoarding and impending recession/depression.

    • Captain Beyond@linkage.ds8.zone
      1·
      14 hours ago

      It’s not free and open source.

      I am not exactly defending this particular scheme but the source code is available under a free software license. It’s only the binaries that are under a proprietary EULA.

      No part of a free software license requires that binaries be made available (gratis or otherwise) or that users be allowed to submit bug reports or feature requests. It is also not against the free software movement philosophy to sell free software.

      • nickwitha_k (he/him)
        1·
        8 hours ago

        I am not exactly defending this particular scheme but the source code is available under a free software license. It’s only the binaries that are under a proprietary EULA.

        I’ll believe it after review and approval by the OSI. It still is philosophically in direct conflict with the Open-Source Movement by making software less accessible to end users and especially non-technical users than it is to corpos.