Not a lawyer so confused about how requiring a fee to get the binary is in practice compatible with open source licenses, which grant the right to redistribute said binary. I.e. even if the project itself does not want to give me a copy of the binary, anyone who has obtained that binary can lawfully gice it to me.

Basically, my understanding is that as long as the software is released under an open source license it is not possible to require a payment for its use or to limit distribution. If you wish to do that you need to relicence.

You're correct, but I guess they're banking on their users preferring to get the binaries straight from the source instead of through an unaffiliated third party. There are also other benefits to paying, such as being able to file issues against the official repository. Seems like a pretty reasonable compromise to me, to be honest.

The license even says you may redistribute the binary you acquire from them:

> User may redistribute the Binary Release received under this Agreement, provided such redistribution complies with the OSI License (e.g., including copyright and permission notices).

https://github.com/wixtoolset/wix/blob/main/OSMFEULA.txt

For one thing, I don't think they think they have a silver bullet here. I think they want some financial support and if some users of the project pay the fee that will be some success.

To the specifics, it's not a software license fee -- they aren't selling access to the software. It's a "maintenance fee", to fund the project. So the license of the code isn't a problem, you can (still) choose to license that under whatever terms are available.

From their FAQ[0]:

> Q: What if I don’t want to pay the Maintenance Fee?

> That’s fine. You can download the project’s source code and follow the Open Source license for the software.

> Do not download releases. Do not reference packages via a package manager. Do not use anything other than the source code released under the Open Source license.

> Also, if you choose to not pay the Maintenance Fee, but find yourself returning to check on the status of issues or review answers to questions others ask, you are still using the project and should pay the Maintenance Fee.

[0] https://opensourcemaintenancefee.org/consumers/faq/

I watched the video on the open source maintenance fee page (https://opensourcemaintenancefee.org/) and it explains that the fee is for 1) people/orgs who make revenue from the open source code AND 2) want to interact with the GitHub project (e.g. open issues). You can however 1) make revenue from the open source code, but not interact with the GitHub project without paying the fee.

For instance, if I'm an organization that wants to use this open source project for free, I can download and build the code, but not download a GitHub generated release binary.

> license it is not possible to require a payment for its use or to limit distribution

Those two are not the same, see https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html

You can also try to charge $10000 for a gold plated CD copy of the Linux kernel without having committed a line yourself.

There are many different open source licenses, and what counts as "open source" can depend on your definition. In theory, you could write a license that makes the source code freely available but restricts binary distribution, or excludes certain groups or use cases from using the software (like not allowing AWS to resell it as a service). Some would argue that's no longer truly open source, but legally, you can add almost any condition to your license.

In this case, it sounds like they're charging a fee for their pre-compiled binaries and possibly using an end user agreement to restrict redistribution. But since the source is available, anyone could compile it themselves and share the binary, unless the license specifically forbids that.

Realistically, though, many people who want the software will just pay for the convenience of the official binary rather than go through the hassle of compiling it or finding someone else who did. So, while the situation is a bit unusual, it doesn't seem like a major issue in practice.

I think the distinction being made here is between the source code (which is remaining open source) and the binary (which is effectively becoming proprietary). Users would no longer have a right to redistribute the binary, since it would no longer be open source.

(To my understanding, this is similar to Microsoft’s “trick” for discouraging VS Code forks: VS Code and many of its core extensions are open source, but their builds are not.)

Probably dependent on jurisdiction - whilst practically, having the binary means you can share it, that's not legal without license to do that (in UK) as even though it's open source the copyright still exists on the binary (and because sharing is copying).

You might be free to compile your own from shared source code, however.

Depends also on the license used ofc.

If it is actually under an open source license then you are correct. They can charge for the right to download it from their servers but they cant stop someone from then redistributing it. Anybody redistributing could also charge if they wanted to.

You can sell open source software and you can charge for binaries and add additional terms on the binaries that restrict distribution. This is how RHEL works. But what you can't do is prevent someone who acquired the source from distributing the source and their own binaries. Which is how Rocky Linux works.