I came across this a few months ago when I was evaluating open source installer options for my own open source project. I have no issue with charging for binaries while the source is available under an OSI license, but this from the README rubbed me the wrong way:

"To ensure the long-term sustainability of this project, use of the WiX Toolset requires an Open Source Maintenance Fee. While the source code is freely available under the terms of the LICENSE, all other aspects of the project--including opening or commenting on issues, participating in discussions and downloading releases--require adherence to the Maintenance Fee.

In short, if you use this project to generate revenue, the Open Source Maintenance Fee is required."

I'll give the benefit of the doubt and assume this is just a difficult concept to succinctly explain in a short paragraph. But that summary - that revenue-generating use requires payment - feels misleading to me. Under their license, nothing stops me from creating my own build from source and using it per the terms of the MS-RL license, including for commercial purposes. So to me it feels like a scare tactic to coerce commercial users into becoming sponsors for the project.

I certainly understand the challenges faced by open source maintainers today, but the specific approach taken here just doesn't feel ethical to me. I ended up passing on WiX for that reason even though I'm not a commercial user.

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maxerickson 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Isn't it just a clear statement that they aren't going to give commercial users support for free?

I know you are saying it isn't clear, but your quote literally includes the statement "While the source code is freely available under the terms of the LICENSE".

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opticfluorine 2 days ago | parent [-]

I personally think this last sentence from my quote makes it unclear:

"In short, if you use this project to generate revenue, the Open Source Maintenance Fee is required."

Perhaps I'm being too semantic, but I don't feel that is an accurate representation of the license terms involved here.

	▲	Applejinx 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		It could add 'and expect active support FROM US' and be more accurate. I guess it's treating 'if you are generating revenue and need support you're gonna be demanding as hell' as implicit?

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TrueDuality 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Start-ups and smaller companies that are extremely cash strapped are willing to take an opensource project, compile it themselves, turn it into deployment artifacts and manage that whole lifecycle. There is a threshold where paying someone to manage and certify the lifecycle of tools is more valuable than keeping it in house.

This is pushing those enterprise customers that are just using and updating binary releases because they don't want to take on the compliance risks of first-party support to pay for official versions.

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hiAndrewQuinn 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I agree with your point. In the name of promoting basic numeracy:

"""

Sign up for GitHub Sponsorship and create the tiers: Small organization (< 20 people): $10/mo Medium organization (20-100 people): $40/mo Large organization (> 100 people): $60/mo

"""

You are beyond 'cash strapped' if $10/month for something as fundamental as this breaks the bank. The fully loaded cost of a single US software developer is already above $100/hour.

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aetherspawn 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

It’s $10/mo and then like 15min/$50/mo in everyone’s time in admin chasing down and filing receipts, reconciling to bank statements, etc.

If you’re a founder doing your own finances, well every additional little monthly charge even if it’s just $1 is quite annoying:

Filing and reconciling 12 receipts takes say 1 hour per year, what if you’re using 20 dependencies? That’s an extra 3-5 days per annum of admin.

	▲	jononor a day ago \| parent [-]
		One nice thing about GitHub sponsorship is that there is only one bill for the sponsor, and one can support NN projects/creators there. I think it is even bundled with the regular Github invoice?

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TrueDuality 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sure, but that also doesn't scale reasonably and is entirely a facile argument. My original comment supports organization paying this price instead of dealing with internal compliance burdens. Looking at one of the package lock files for a previous company I still occasionally contract for, there are 9400 dependencies referenced.

So in the name of promoting basic numeracy, and taking into account the realities of scale. Matching that cost for those dependencies (this is a >100 person company) would be $560k per month. That gets you minimal support, just a guarantee that you can submit issues. No guaranteed security maintenance, compliance, or governance of the project.

You can spin up a very strong developer team for forking and maintaining an internal copy of opensource projects at that cost and a lot of large companies do just that. Should they contribute those changes back? Sure if that made sense.

A lot of time in my experience that internal copy is stripped to the bones of functionality to remove the surface area of vulnerabilities if the useful piece isn't extracted into the larger body of code directly. It's less functional with major changes specific to that environment. Would the upstream accept that massive gutting? Probably not. Could the company publish their minimal version? Sure but there are costs there as well and you DO have to justify that time and cost.

Would a company in-house the support and development of a tool over $40/month? Absolutely not, for a one-off case that's probably fine. If you want to meaningfully address the compensation issue from enterprises, opensource single-project subscriptions aren't going to be the answer.

I would LOVE to see more developer incentive programs, but one-by-one options aren't scalable and most projects don't want to provide the table-stakes level of support required of any vendor they work with. It's not optional for those organizations, its law and private contracts.

	▲	robmensching 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Note that the package.lock file is not the place to look for your OSMF dependencies. That file will list your project's dependencies and all of their dependencies and so on and so on. You want to look at the list of packages in your package.json file. That will almost certainly be an order of magnitude (or two) smaller. For example, IIRC, GitHub (all of GitHub) calculated they had 660 direct dependencies. That's still a lot but it's not 9400. :)

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codedokode a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> The fully loaded cost of a single US software developer is already above $100/hour.

To be pedantic, it can be $0 if the developer is you yourself, or your friends, wives, husbands and other relatives.

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x0x0 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The only object is that monthly fees are super annoying. I'd much prefer an annual :shrug:

	▲	robmensching 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		You can pay annually. GitHub Sponsors allows that.

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9cb14c1ec0 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes, just a couple of minutes setting up a Github action on a fork, and you're good to go.

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robmensching a day ago | parent [-]

Yep, and now you have about half a million lines of code* to maintain as well. Have fun with it!*

* Last count the WiX Toolset had 589,719 loc but 444,936 if you skip comments and whitespace.

* This is the point, maintaining successful (and often non-trivial) projects requires a good bit of work.

	▲	9cb14c1ec0 a day ago \| parent [-]
		You can always just merge in the latest changes from the upstream project with a click or too. No need to maintain it on your own.

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ApolloFortyNine 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

They actually provide the github action they use to build the releases in their repo already, so you could likely get this done in under 5 minutes.

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zvr 2 days ago | parent [-]

And that's what a number of organizations have set up since March.

	▲	robmensching 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		No. Not really. There are 406 forks, and ~10 were created in the last 5 months. The other people on this thread are more correct.

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robmensching 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I'll give the benefit of the doubt and assume this is just a difficult concept to succinctly explain in a short paragraph.

It is challenging to describe the concept succinctly, especially as there are lots of varied expectations people have about how Open Source projects work. I'm definitely open to suggestions on how to improve the text.

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ysofunny 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think they're trying to say that if you are talking to them on behalf or a revenue generating entity, then you better pay them to talk to them about the project.

feels like a pay to interect iff one of the parties interacting is a profit making entity

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csomar a day ago | parent | prev [-]

If you read the comments on the GitHub issue, the guys seems more than reasonable. My understanding is that they want you pay if you are making money. My guess if you are just a one-person show with a just-started product, they probably won't care much.

Here is their sponsorship page: https://github.com/sponsors/wixtoolset

	▲	robmensching 20 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, that's basically it.