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

Note: This uses github sponsors, which is a microsoft owned middleman as @[email protected] mentioned. I heavily recommend https://liberapay.com/ as an alternative. The idea of the project is solid, though

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/27040265

I personally think this is a good idea. FOSS is amazing but it needs some funding in reality. What are your thoughts?

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlEnglish
    5·
    23 hours ago

    cross-post of my comment elsewhere:

    I immediately knew this was going to be from Microsoft users, and yeah… of course, it is.

    Binaries distributed under this EULA do not meet the free software definition or open source definition.

    However, unlike most attempts to dilute the concept of open source, since the EULA is explicitly scoped to binaries and says it is meant to be applied to projects with source code that is released under an OSI-approved license, I think the source code of projects using this do still meet the open source definition (as long as the code is actually under such a license). Anyone/everyone should still be free to fork any project using this, and to distribute free binaries which are not under this EULA.

    This EULA obviously cannot be applied to projects using a copyleft license, unless all contributors to it have dual-licensed their contributions to allow (at least) the entity that is distributing non-free binaries under this EULA to do so.

    I think it is extremely short-sighted to tell non-paying “consumers” of an open source project that their bug reports are not welcome. People who pay for support obviously get to heavily influence which bugs get priority, but to tell non-paying users that they shouldn’t even report bugs is implicitly communicating that 2nd and 3rd party collaboration on fixing bugs is not expected or desired.

    A lot of Microsoft-oriented developers still don’t understand the free software movement, and have been trying to twist it into something they can comprehend since it started four decades ago. This is the latest iteration of that; at least this time they aren’t suggesting that people license their source code under non-free licenses.