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.

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    1 day ago

    Fuck this project, but… their source code can be free and open source even if they distribute binaries which aren’t. (Which they can do if they own the copyright, and/or if it is under a permissive non-copyleft FOSS license.)

    And if the source code is actually FOSS, and many people actually want to use it, someone else will distribute FOSS binaries without this stupid EULA. So, this BS is still much better than a non-FOSS license like FUTO’s.

    • DigitalDilemma@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      8 hours ago

      Fuck this project, but… their source code can be free and open source even if they distribute binaries which aren’t.

      An example of how this didn’t work for one project. (From memory, and it was a long time ago - 2005/2008 ish)

      Xchat was once the best IRC client for Windows (after Mirc). It was free software, but the developer started charging for the Windows builds of it. Linux binaries were still free, but he claimed that it was time consuming to build on Windows and etc etc (A bit rich considering it was mostly his code - and there were suspicions he made it deliberately so)

      Some people were pretty pissed off about this, especially as it used some other code that was foss and it was felt against the spirit.

      Anyway, it was cloned into Hexchat which is fully free on all platforms and apparently not so difficult to build binaries after all.

      15 years later to today, Hexchat is thriving and Xchat has been completely dead for 15 years.

    • bruce965@lemmy.ml
      3·
      1 day ago

      Fair enough, but then it’s the same thing as open-sourcing the code but not providing support nor binaries.

      I mean, personally I also prefer it to FUTO’s proprietary license, that’s for sure. But I’m one of the few privileged users who can build from source.

      If this license doesn’t impose any extra restrictions on the code (and as you say, anyone can fork and provide prebuilt binaries), then this would just increase the risk of spreading malware, with no real benefits for the original developers.

      In my opinion, if you want to monetize your software without going proprietary, all you have to do is provide the users a convenient way to get it. There are some paid FOSS apps on Google Play, as well as some paid FOSS games on Steam. You don’t want to distribute binaries? Fine, okay, that’s alright and I respect your choice. You don’t want to provide support to non-paying users? Fine, that’s very reasonable in my opinion. But…

      …do you want to impose extra restrictions on your code? Fine to me, but then you are no longer doing open source, don’t try to pretend you are. And if you are not imposing any restrictions on the code then you are imho just going to hurt small users. We shouldn’t fight small users imho, we should fight the big corporations exploiting FOSS code for their proprietary businesses. But if there are no extra restrictions on the code, then big corporations wouldn’t care.

      That’s my opinion.

      • Captain Beyond@linkage.ds8.zone
        2·
        16 hours ago

        But I’m one of the few privileged users who can build from source.

        There are avenues available for less-privileged users to obtain builds of free software projects (e.g. GNU/Linux distributions, F-Droid, and so on).

        • bruce965@lemmy.ml
          1·
          9 hours ago

          Then what’s even is the point of this license? There will always be a third party distributing unofficial binaries.

          And if this license forbade third parties to redistribute binaries, then it would no longer really be FOSS.