>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.

Surprised downloading releases is in there, I'm not a lawyer but I'm pretty sure this goes against it's own license on the source code, specifically:

>each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free copyright license to reproduce its contribution, prepare derivative works of its contribution, and distribute its contribution or any derivative works that you create.

At the very least it's confusing, and if anything, comically easy to bypass and literally forces someone to automate a github mirror that builds new releases. Your essentially enforcing the existence of a fork. They even provide the github actions necessary to do so in their repo already...

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kube-system a day ago | parent | next [-]

The license snippet you quoted means that they have given YOU the right to copy, change (or compile), and redistribute, distribute anything you've created from it. Nothing about that implies contributors are required to give you binaries.

This isn't all that uncommon -- usually open source licenses only apply to the source.

> comically easy to bypass and literally forces someone to automate a github mirror that builds new releases. Your essentially enforcing the existence of a fork. They even provide the github actions necessary to do so in their repo already...

Yeah, cloning and building software is something that is straightforward for software developers to do. Traditionally people would clone software to their own machine, but you can use GitHub or whatever tools you want to work with the source. I'm not sure if I would call this a "bypass" -- this is the typical way FOSS software has always worked, and it's part of the reason why FOSS is popular :)

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ApolloFortyNine a day ago | parent | next [-]

>I'm not sure if I would call this a "bypass" -- this is the typical way FOSS software has always worked, and it's part of the reason why FOSS is popular :)

Any other packages you know of that are open source but have a trap license where if you download it through the package manager you owe them money? :)

Plus the license mentions the binaries have to be distributed with the same license. Attaching a "if you click this download button you owe us $10000" button doesn't seem very typical to common FOSS values :) I'd say a big reason FOSS is so popular is the free and open source nature :)

	▲	kube-system a day ago \| parent [-]
		> Any other packages you know of that are open source but have a trap license where if you download it through the package manager you owe them money? :) It's pretty common in Google Play and the Apple App Store. The only difference here is that payment is on the honors system. > Plus the license mentions the binaries have to be distributed with the same license. Sure, but there's nothing in that license that says you can't ask for money for the binaries. The only requirement of distribution in the license is: > (A) Reciprocal Grants- For any file you distribute that contains code from the software (in source code or binary format), you must provide recipients the source code to that file [...] It doesn't say: "if you distribute source, you must distribute binaries" You are free to ask for money for the binaries. Now, due to the terms of the license, anyone else could distribute that binary. But it doesn't require you to do it for free. > Attaching a "if you click this download button you owe us $10000" button doesn't seem very typical to common FOSS values :) I'd say a big reason FOSS is so popular is the free and open source nature :) FOSS distributions have been commercially sold for many decades. I bought my first copy of Linux. FOSS has traditionally only applied to source code and any related activities have long been left open for commercial opportunity. This is how FOSS companies afford to operate.

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a day ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

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robmensching 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Absolutely true, but that isn't what happened (at least, not yet). Most companies found the fee reasonable and worth it to have us maintain the project and not have to fork it.

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ApolloFortyNine a day ago | parent [-]

>Most companies found the fee reasonable and worth it to have us maintain the project and not have to fork it.

You must have incredibly good analytics to know exactly what companies are using your nuget package. Did you embed a phone home?

	▲	vpq a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		WiX usage is easy to check, just open an installer with Orca, and you'll see a bunch of WiX artifacts. Checking whether it's their own compile or official binaries is also simple if they use an extension like the official Util one, which many do: It embeds a binary that implements the custom action, which is signed by FireGiant. As for turning this into analytics / statistics, I imagine you could just download every MSI from winget and just check if they contain a FireGiant-signed extension dll.
	▲	robmensching a day ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I was specifically talking about the companies paying the Fee and the feedback I got from others who don't use the WiX Toolset but understand Open Source and the problems facing maintainers. But it is easy to tell when an installation package is built by the WiX Toolset (or any other tool) when you know where to look.
	▲	notpushkin a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		If this is about WiX, I think it’s easy to just spot their installers in the wild.