[HN Gopher] Why I Didn't Open-Source My Second SaaS
___________________________________________________________________
Why I Didn't Open-Source My Second SaaS
Author : amzans
Score : 118 points
Date : 2021-03-11 15:15 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (panelbear.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (panelbear.com)
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| I once thought that the worst in opensource are forum people
| (later replaced by GitHub people) who demand premium service when
| they encounter a bug. But then I learned that the worst in
| opensource are users with access to reviews with rating:
|
| _I give you 1 /5 because the app doesn't do what I want and you
| don't kiss my ass nice enough. You don't know how to treat your
| customers right, how childish of you to ask money to fix my
| particular problem!!_
|
| For some reason a lot of people believe that leaving a review
| with bad rating for a free and opensource app will motivate the
| developers fix the issue asap, in hope that the user will change
| the rating to 2/5.
| laurent92 wrote:
| > who demand premium service when encountering a bug
|
| In the same vein, I have a bully, he both writes me on my
| professional email (to ask me for reparations), AND writes me
| on public forums 12hrs later asking why I didn't answer him
| yet. So it is not only free users who expect premium service,
| nowadays even bullies expect 12-hrs response ;)
|
| (For all I'm concerned, he can go to court if he really
| believes I owe him something, I give it 0% chance, but he's
| clinging to his illusions).
| mrtksn wrote:
| I'm curious, what's his claim? Used your software, something
| happened making lose data or anything like that?
| laurent92 wrote:
| Sorry for the off-topic, it is a very lowerclass problem:
| We did Youtube episodes at 4 people and we noticed he had a
| private life that we didn't want to be associated with, so
| we removed him from the next episodes (under a false
| pretense to avoid saying in public what we had discovered).
| So he wants 15k because we've kept the previous episodes
| online (to which he was interviewed knowingly, didn't say
| anything abnormal either, there's only his first name, and
| only the voice no video, it's ~8k views, not monetized),
| and he said even if we removed them he'd keep on taking
| revenge for the next 30 years. So we estimated it wasn't
| worth removing the other episodes, given the debate was
| still interesting, and given he would move on to whatever
| the next step of his plan his, and I'm not the one with
| control over the videos anyway. It's very he-said-she-
| said/low-IQ/honor-system-with-angry-people, I'm ashamed of
| myself for having been involved in this dispute, I hadn't
| recognized the bad side of his character earlier. In the
| end I think he's just afraid that we tell his private thing
| in public, but the more he angers us, the more he risks one
| of us to leak it out of annoyance. That was 2 years ago, I
| would just like him to stop trying to find my address, but
| I'm not going to give him 15kEUR either.
|
| Just lowerclass problems.
| getpolarized wrote:
| The problem is that 95% of users are awesome but 5% are VERY
| aggressive and angry.
|
| The amount of people that personally attack you and accuse you
| of horrible things should be zero.
|
| I've also seen users personally using our forums to try to get
| the software for free and complaining it costs too much money.
|
| As soon as it's clear that one of the developers is listening
| they go quiet but it's super disheartening when your community,
| which should be supporting you, feels so entitled.
| rurp wrote:
| > The problem is that 95% of users are awesome but 5% are
| VERY aggressive and angry.
|
| Interestingly enough I used to have a customer facing job in
| a completely different industry and it was exactly the same
| situation there. 90-95% of customers were great; they were
| pleasant and easy to deal with. But man, the bad ones took up
| sooo much time and energy, it was ridiculous.
| hydroxideOH- wrote:
| This is what happens with my open source Chrome extension's
| reviews on the Chrome Web Store. Not that you can really make
| money off of extensions even if I wanted to, but such is life.
| Glench wrote:
| Heh, it is totally possible to make money off extensions. You
| just need to provide value. Here are some examples:
|
| - $100k with a browser extension:
| https://www.indiehackers.com/post/css-scan-made-
| over-100k-d6...
|
| - $38k/month with a browser extension:
| https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/187-jordan-oconnor-
| of-c...
|
| - $3.1k/month with a browser extension:
| https://www.indiehackers.com/product/night-eye
|
| - $2.5k/month with a browser extension:
| https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/weather-extension-
| ad9...
| cercatrova wrote:
| Not to mention Honey, which sold to PayPal for $4 billion.
| seanwilson wrote:
| > Not that you can really make money off of extensions even
| if I wanted to, but such is life.
|
| Why not? There's successful projects selling or based around
| extensions.
| j1elo wrote:
| " _I 'm sorry let me refund the money you paid for this_" must
| be the all time favorite answer for stubborn or impolite users
| of software that has been provided for free and with no strings
| attached.
|
| My second favorite (would be first if not for the slightly
| snarky style) is " _Please, go read the License_ ". This is to
| say that the License typically states that "this software is
| provided AS-IS with no guarantees at all", but in a very
| indirect way that most people won't understand when told to
| them... but I still like that answer, FWIW :-)
| [deleted]
| moosebear847 wrote:
| Lol what the heck, the first one is WAY more snarky than the
| second! Unless you meant that the second is just not dripping
| in enough snark.
| sylvain_kerkour wrote:
| Very good read, Thanks!
| mattkrick wrote:
| I built an open-source B2B SaaS that recently raised its Series
| A. While I'm not a solo founder, we were a team of 3 up until we
| raised our seed.
|
| The difference I see is traduora looks like a project, not a
| company. Sell support! Don't give it away for free. If someone
| asks me for a bugfix, I show them the ticket in our open backlog
| & tell them if they want it done faster, they have to pay. Seeing
| their concern turned in to a ticket shows them that I care, but
| telling them I prioritize paid fixes tells them it's not a
| charity. Don't let them feel entitled.
| jandrese wrote:
| If they opt to not pay do you leave the bug in your system
| forever?
|
| I've always been a little annoyed at this model, because with
| so many companies it comes down to "I paid you $120,000/year
| for this support contract and you're telling me you've been
| able to track down this bug I reported, but you're not going to
| fix it because it's not on the project your developers are
| currently working on." And then they get really miffed if you
| drop the support contract next year, telling us how we'll be
| locked out of security and feature updates, even though there
| were zero releases in the past calendar year. If I'm playing
| for the equivalent of a full time junior developer I expect at
| least some action on my bug reports.
| gcheong wrote:
| If they opt not to pay then the bug gets fixed according to
| severity and priority in the regular development cycles. It's
| possible it will never get fixed. I see your point with paid
| support contracts that don't give you anything, and you would
| be justified to cut your losses, but I think this was more
| specific to individual bugs that a company wants to up the
| priority for.
| kureikain wrote:
| I used to swear by Open Source try to build an uptime monitoring
| but failed https://github.com/yeo/notyim and a few other thing.
|
| Eventually one day I want to do email forwarding, I was thinking
| open source or not and pretty much chooese to go with close-
| source for now.
|
| I can see myself open source in the future when I get enough
| customers and I have more time to cleanup the private stuff in
| our mono repository right now.
|
| But for an early self-bootstrap self-funded I feel like focus too
| much on Open Source and I don't have time to focus on the growth
| or marketing.
|
| I finally release my first SaaS this year, make $78/month right
| now(don't laugh at me). https://hanami.run
|
| I would say I'm not against opensource and it definetely work for
| others, but for me, by not going open source I can focus on the
| business itself. With that being, I contributed back such as a
| mail parser https://github.com/yeo/parsemail
| https://github.com/yeo/pix
|
| I can imagine myself release a lite-version(our early prototype)
| where we can forward email using a config file, instead of a
| database with all the user, membership stuff that no one care
| about if you want to self-hosted my SaaS.
| StavrosK wrote:
| This is semi off topic, but the sentence "housing in Munich has
| gone insane" struck me. Housing in my city in Greece has gone
| crazy too, a two-bedroom apartment costs significantly more than
| minimum wage, and I don't know who can afford to stay there.
|
| Does anyone why housing everywhere seems to be going nuts? This
| can't be a good sign.
| sofixa wrote:
| > Does anyone why housing everywhere seems to be going nuts?
| This can't be a good sign.
|
| It will depend on the location, but usually a mix of more
| people in the big cities, inflation, low interest rates ( so
| low mortgage rates), physical constraints ( most cities can't
| sprawl forever), sometimes regulations ( like zoning).
|
| It's mostly in big cities though, go to a small one without any
| obvious geographic advantage ( like being on the seaside), and
| prices are usually much lower and stagnating.
|
| Also depending on location, IMHO the pandemic has shown to a
| lot of people that remote work is possible and can be
| productive, so there will be some moves towards smaller cities
| and villages + remote working for big city businesses.
| StavrosK wrote:
| That makes sense, thanks. I expected prices in the big city
| to drop too in the pandemic (at least because of a drop in
| tourism), but, if anything, they've gone up...
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| This is how it happens in California, do many of these happen
| in Europe?
|
| - Populations are growing.
|
| - Younger folks would rather live in the city.
|
| - Sets of homeowners and voters heavily overlap.
|
| - Government supports homeowners via tax policy, all housing is
| already taken.
|
| - Existing homeowners prevent new construction.
|
| - Some portion of renters enjoying rent control also support
| NIMBY policies.
|
| A perfect recipe for housing scarcity and therefore high
| prices.
| StavrosK wrote:
| If anything, populations here are declining, the set of
| voters is basically "everyone", or near enough, owning a home
| isn't _particularly_ supported? Though not discouraged
| either, there is quite a bit of new construction, but on the
| outskirts of the city (as happens usually), and there are no
| rent-control policies.
|
| This is why I'm mystified as to what's driving prices up,
| I've heard things like increasing tourism making owning a
| home a good investment, foreigners buying homes to get
| citizenship (a "golden passport"), and foreigners trying to
| spend their unlaundered fortunes abroad.
| marvinblum wrote:
| A few months ago, I've started a similar analytics project [0],
| which I have now turned into a product [1] together with my co-
| founder. The difference to Panelbear is, that I've started this
| to be used on my personal website, so it was open-source right
| from the beginning and without the intention to make money. In
| fact, you can still use our core library for free (AGPL
| licensed).
|
| When we looked at the other solutions out there, we saw that a
| lot of them offer a self-hosted version for free. Giving away
| whole products for free has become a trend I don't anticipate.
| You can be sure there is an open-source, free as in free beer
| replacement for almost anything, which makes it really hard to
| build a sustainable business. While you _can_ generate some
| traction off of it, you also have to deal with people asking for
| free support, new features, bug fixes, and so on. I have quite a
| lot of open-source projects, one of them is a game server
| management web UI [2]. It breaks my heard every time I have to
| tell someone that I can 't support their request. There are cases
| where it makes sense to have the product fully open-source of
| course, like an operating system, or anything that can be
| considered "infrastructure".
|
| Writing software is difficult and it takes countless hours to
| build something useful that is non-trivial. If it's something a
| lot of people rely on, think about charging for it, instead of
| giving it away for free. But in the end it's your time after all.
|
| [0] https://github.com/pirsch-analytics/pirsch
|
| [1] https://pirsch.io/
|
| [2] https://github.com/assetto-corsa-web/accweb
| candiddevmike wrote:
| I came to a similar junction with my app. It's B2C SaaS, and I
| bluntly want to earn money for all the years I put into it. I
| chose to add a free tier and self hosting as a compromise.
|
| In the future, I would love to open source it. But for now, all I
| see in other B2C/consumer OSS projects is a lot of complaining,
| frustration, and extra work without a benefit to my paying
| customers.
| vemv wrote:
| How about: business logic is and remains private, but support
| libraries, boilerplate, etc is offered as discrete OSS
| repositories.
|
| This isn't too fancy - quite commonly corps and startups alike
| offer some generic libraries. One can take that pattern to
| greater degrees.
|
| This allows to scratch the itch of sharing something with the
| community, while still guaranteeing a livelihood.
|
| Of course, it's mostly an incompatible approach for those
| favoring a _strict_ monorepo- and microservice-based
| architecture.
| mooreds wrote:
| We do this with a lot of our stuff at my current employer. It's
| a good compromise in my experience.
| mattbuilds wrote:
| I have a similar plan with my current project [0] of
| interactive coding docs. The library to build the docs would be
| OSS. So anyone could build it and use it in their projects, But
| the business of hosting courses, payment, an advanced UI for
| building the docs would all be a SaaS. I think it's a nice
| balance that gives you the best of both worlds.
|
| [0] https://devbyexample.com
| zomglings wrote:
| git submodules, despite their warts, do help incorporate a
| bunch of distinct code bases into a monorepo.
| vemv wrote:
| That might be also considered a multirepo in disguise :)
| zomglings wrote:
| Haha - you are right, and it is why git submodules have
| warts. One thing I will say for them - at least you know
| explicitly which commits of your dependencies you are
| using.
| marvinblum wrote:
| Agreed. If it's something that has no business value in itself
| and can be adopted by others (which might contribute in
| return), open-source it. There are also half-open/open-core
| models, see my comment below.
| Jaygles wrote:
| I don't think the author made a compelling argument as to why
| open-sourcing his code led to the problems he describes. It
| sounds like having the code open sourced took too much of his
| time away since it allowed people to make requests for things.
| But I don't see why that means he necessarily has to take time to
| fulfill the requests.
|
| Sounds like he was too focused in one area of his project, and
| needed to take a step back to get a broader view of the state of
| things. I'm not convinced the closed/open source nature of his
| code is responsible for that.
| mooreds wrote:
| I think his point was that folks who participate in open source
| have higher demands for changes and support. If a business is
| pure SaaS only with no open source code behind it, there is
| less interaction in general. I'm sure there's still support
| tickets and whatnot, but there's not the same level of "please
| fix this" requests. People just move on from commercial
| packages if they don't do what they need, in my experience.
|
| From the post:
|
| > In the past, when it came to running a business as a solo-
| founder, having it open source created too much maintenance
| burden for very specific feature requests. In particular from
| non-paying users, who sometimes sent me emails directly,
| demanding I look at their issue, or help them fix things "as
| soon as possible".
|
| This lack of interaction is both a feature (lets you focus, you
| have time to take care of paying users) and a bug (less
| interaction means you could build the wrong thing, the source
| is no longer a marketing mechanism for you).
| Jaygles wrote:
| Right, I agree with you, but as I said
|
| > It sounds like having the code open sourced took too much
| of his time away since it allowed people to make requests for
| things. But I don't see why that means he necessarily has to
| take time to fulfill the requests.
|
| The existence of the interactions doesn't necessitate
| engaging with them. If engaging with interactions is taking
| too much time away, one could simply, not engage with them.
| mooreds wrote:
| > The existence of the interactions doesn't necessitate
| engaging with them. If engaging with interactions is taking
| too much time away, one could simply, not engage with them.
|
| Sure, I get it, everyone needs to prioritize. But if you
| are ignoring interactions on your OSS project, you can
| expect more, oh, I'll call it 'heat'. I have seen those
| github issue threads, where people get frustrated because
| someone hasn't engaged.
|
| So if you aren't going to engage, why open source it? Sure,
| there are other reasons, but the community feedback loop is
| a crucial part of the value of OSS for building a business.
|
| Also, I get there's nuance and you can choose to engage
| when there's been a certain level of commitment from the
| community (a number of upvotes is what my current company
| uses to help prioritize efforts), but for a solo founder it
| can be really hard to prioritize, and the author apparently
| found all the requests a distraction. His choice, but I
| sympathize.
| sodality2 wrote:
| >So if you aren't going to engage, why open source it?
|
| I'd argue engagement is only a medium part of open
| source: plenty of projects publish code and never accept
| requests/issues, and are very popular. It is always nice
| to open source even if you don't accept PR's/review
| issues, because it gives me more trust.
| mooreds wrote:
| So the main benefit of OSS you see is promoting trust in
| the company building the open source software?
|
| I'm sure there are plenty of blog posts out there, but I
| can see the following benefits: *
| marketing halo ("we do open source") * community
| feedback, both bugs and features * community
| contributions * trust in the company *
| trust in continuity of the product (even if the company
| fails, I can continue to run this product) * cost
|
| As I said, I'm sure there are more, I'm not experienced
| enough to weigh them all, and I'm guessing they vary
| based on the size, stage and goals of the company. That
| said, feedback from the community does seem pretty
| important to me.
| pwdisswordfish0 wrote:
| You're conflating open source software, which is any
| software published under an OSS license, with an open
| development model. (Not to mention the assumption that
| "open source" automatically means publishing to GitHub--
| it doesn't.)
|
| Apple, for example, publishes a ton of stuff over at
| opensource.apple.com. But the majority of it is stuff
| thrown over the wall, and not attached to a community
| that has to be actively managed.
|
| The insistence on confusing these things for other people
| is perhaps one of the biggest threats to open source.
| mooreds wrote:
| Fair. Would you say that the author of the post was
| speaking about the issues with an open development model?
|
| That's a great distinction as there are companies out
| there doing open development who may have a closed source
| product.
| yw3410 wrote:
| Yes; but you have to remember that git forges like GitHub
| and Gitlab push you towards that the open development
| model with their defaults.
| Jaygles wrote:
| There's certainly value in engaging with the community
| through the open sourced code. In the end its all a
| balancing act and getting it right is the hard part. I'm
| not trying to claim to know how much effort should be
| going in each aspect. If I did, I'd be running a
| successful business right about now.
| bachmeier wrote:
| > Sure, I get it, everyone needs to prioritize. But if
| you are ignoring interactions on your OSS project, you
| can expect more, oh, I'll call it 'heat'. I have seen
| those github issue threads, where people get frustrated
| because someone hasn't engaged.
|
| Companies selling non-OSS products get slammed with
| requests on a large scale and they have to deal with them
| somehow. Todoist immediately comes to mind. I mean, sure,
| it's possible that some users of a paid product will
| conclude you don't know what you're doing and take their
| business elsewhere, but that's kind of like boasting
| about fixing your broken finger by cutting off your arm.
| brobdingnagians wrote:
| I think the key thing is whether the people making the
| feature requests are paying you. We get feature requests
| all the time, but they are the people paying us thousands
| of dollars, so those take priority. If they aren't, or it
| doesn't appear that anyone else paying us will use it,
| then they shouldn't take priority. This is a way of
| whittling down what is really valuable to people, rather
| than just they took long enough to write an email about a
| cool thing they really think you should do.
| evanelias wrote:
| This makes sense for feature requests, but not always for
| other types of support.
|
| When a user opens an issue, sometimes it can be very time-
| consuming just to determine whether the user is
| encountering a legitimate edge-case bug, vs the user doing
| something wrong and not reporting it accurately. This type
| of issue can't be ignored entirely, because if it's a legit
| bug, then it's present in the paid SaaS product as well.
|
| Also consider that many GitHub accounts don't mention real
| names or company affiliations. It can be hard to tell
| whether an issue submitter is some rando or a loyal paying
| customer. Even if you have a separate bug tracker or
| support system for paying customers, some of them will
| submit issues to the open source project by mistake.
| musingsole wrote:
| Given the response times to bugs by paid teams compelled
| on threat of terminated employment to implement fixes for
| things...an open source maintainer absolutely could
| ignore even critical bugs.
|
| I've seen many maintainers whinging about the demands of
| communities on their time. But it's all 'choose-your-
| level-of-involvement'. Those people clamoring for
| attention may be annoyed and frustrated with you, but
| that doesn't answer the question as to why that's a
| problem unless you choose for it to be.
| evanelias wrote:
| > an open source maintainer absolutely could ignore even
| critical bugs
|
| If the maintainer is a solopreneur, whose source of
| income is a paid SaaS version of the open source project,
| then no they typically cannot ignore critical bugs.
|
| > Those people clamoring for attention may be annoyed and
| frustrated with you, but that doesn't answer the question
| as to why that's a problem unless you choose for it to
| be.
|
| Out of curiosity have you ever maintained a decently
| popular single-primary-maintainer open source project?
| How about one with a SaaS or commercial version?
|
| Frequent frustrating interactions with users isn't
| exactly beneficial to one's sense of motivation, at least
| in my experience (which mirrors the original article
| quite closely).
| musingsole wrote:
| Commercial products ignore critical bugs all the time. A
| bug being an impact to income is a relative thing for
| everyone, corporations to sole proprietors. As is
| response to your customers/community. Not everyone needs
| or at all provides stellar customer service.
|
| Maintainers may have a degree of involvement necessitated
| by their business needs. However, the loudest people
| screaming for support are very rarely even the same niche
| as those funding a project. So ignore the whining; listen
| to the constructive bits if they're there. Delete
| messages en masse and move on with your life.
| evanelias wrote:
| In my field (database automation) I do not ignore bug
| reports, ever. Critical bugs can mean data loss and
| severe reputational harm.
|
| YMMV. We can agree to disagree.
| musingsole wrote:
| Because in your specific niche of software you can't
| imagine letting a bug report hang for a day...you're
| incapable of understanding that that is not the case for
| 99% of software? You're unaware of bug tickets wallowing
| in backlogs for days to years?
| evanelias wrote:
| I have said nothing about what I can or cannot imagine or
| understand. I specifically said YMMV to indicate that I
| acknowledge experiences will differ across fields.
|
| I find your tone to be uncivil and I do not wish to
| continue this discussion with you.
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| > If engaging with interactions is taking too much time
| away, one could simply, not engage with them.
|
| This choice isn't always as simple as it sounds. There is,
| strange as it is, a real reputational risk to be known as a
| disengaged open source maintainer.
|
| It's a real PR risk to have a demanding open source user
| who personally emails you then takes to Twitter to denounce
| the project if you don't engage. It's also definitely a
| risk for a paid, proprietary project too, but for some
| reason it doesn't seem to happen as often.
| Roark66 wrote:
| >> If engaging with interactions is taking too much time
| away, one could simply, not engage with them.
|
| >This choice isn't always as simple as it sounds. There
| is, strange as it is, a real reputational risk to be
| known as a disengaged open source maintainer.
|
| IMO there is middle ground. One can engage with a canned
| response stating support for non paying customers is
| provided on a "Best effort" basis and current high
| commercial demand doesn't allow the maintainer to offer
| as much time as she/he would like to for free...
|
| Reasonable people will understand, perhaps some of them
| will even convert to paying customers. Bad PR from
| unreasonable people will happen regardless.
| Jaygles wrote:
| I agree, I just phrased it as a black and white thing as
| a way of trying to make the point I was making more
| clear. There's nuance in all things.
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| Sure, but then I think mooreds comment is a convincing
| rebuttal of
|
| > Sounds like he was too focused in one area of his
| project, and needed to take a step back to get a broader
| view of the state of things. I'm not convinced the
| closed/open source nature of his code is responsible for
| that.
|
| It's not that the author was overly focused on one thing.
| It was just that he didn't want to pay the cost.
| Jaygles wrote:
| That's fair, I was making some assumptions when making
| that statement. Maybe a better point to make would be
| that he was overly prioritizing one aspect over others.
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| > overly
|
| Again I think this is an unfair characterization of the
| author's point.
|
| All that being said, I think your original point, that
| you can have open source without engagement _and minimal
| PR risk_ , is doable on reflection, you just need to
| break away from the usual open source mould. So e.g. that
| means not using GitHub, GitLab, Sourcehut, etc. to host
| your code. Instead just provide a contact method that
| customers can use to request code on demand such as an
| email address or mailing address.
|
| Minimize any other contact surface area and enforce
| trademark heavily so that any users re-uploading the code
| to other sites must change the name.
|
| Basically make sure to hide the official open source
| channel away from non-paying users.
|
| At that point it's another interesting question whether
| it's still worth it to the author to go open source
| (since you're giving up most of the stated commercial
| benefits of open source, especially those surrounding
| reputation), but it's a way of minimizing the
| reputational risk of non-engagement.
|
| And of course sometimes you may judge the reputational
| risk to be acceptable.
| Jaygles wrote:
| Well, in the author's own words...
|
| > I was too focused on developing every feature, trying
| to give support to every single ticket, and I completely
| ignored the marketing aspects of it as I had no time for
| it.
|
| Saying the author was overly prioritizing responding to
| the communications that open sourcing the code allowed to
| come through shouldn't be controversial. He himself is
| admitting to it.
|
| My main point is that the author hasn't convinced me that
| blame should be placed on open sourcing the code. To me
| that's akin to blaming the messenger. He should instead
| be looking to why he felt obligated to spend the time
| supporting "every single ticket", when he himself knew
| that he was neglecting other aspects of the business side
| of things.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| My experience is strongly aligned with the author's. There is a
| substantial real-world overhead associated with open sourcing
| code, all other things being equal. This overhead is imposed on
| you whether you want it or not. If you are operating in a
| resource constrained environment, like the author, then not
| open sourcing is a sensible cost containment measure. Open
| sourcing code is a luxury for those with ample time or money.
|
| I have code I could open source (e.g. some very useful Postgres
| extensions created for a company) but I value my time more, and
| I know many others that view the calculus similarly. There is
| value in open sourcing code but we should be honest about the
| associated costs and not pretend they don't exist.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| I'd tend to agree for a small package. But, this was a
| company with a community (according to author). Pointing
| requests to the paid support page would turn lemons into
| lemonade. We can only speculate why this didn't happen.
| serial_dev wrote:
| Exactly, I think people misunderstand what open source means.
|
| Open source doesn't mean that you need to provide hours of free
| support to someone who couldn't even bother to write a proper
| issue description. For a matter of fact, you don't even need to
| provide free support to anyone, no matter how nice they are and
| no matter how well they written the issue You can help them,
| but you don't have to.
|
| You also don't need to accept pull requests: if you think that
| the feature doesn't make sense or the code quality is terrible,
| or it's just not important to you, you don't need to accept
| pull requests.
|
| You also don't need to bend over backwards to maintain a
| stabile API.
|
| It makes your life easier if you communicate this in the README
| of the package, tell people that it's the early days of the
| product, you develop in the open, but you aren't going to abide
| by other people's unrealistic expectations about _your_ open
| source work.
| ipaddr wrote:
| I find just throwing code into github is my perfect level of
| open sourcing. It's public and I can pull the code into any
| project.
|
| No pesky user requests or stars.
|
| Accepting pull requests on smaller projects seems strange. If
| I wrote this why do I want someone else sharing credit.
| Qwertious wrote:
| >Exactly, I think people misunderstand what open source
| means.
|
| "Misunderstand" implies there's some authoritative definition
| on "open source" means here. I remember people considering
| Dasura "not open source" even though it was GPLv2, simply
| because they didn't accept patches and only threw code over
| the wall.
|
| To a lot of people, open source means engaging on Github. You
| can say "they're wrong", but that's just disagreement.
| j_san wrote:
| While it's technically not open-sourcing code itself it's human
| nature in my opinion. As a founder you want to support and
| don't upset your customers, even if they are using the free
| version of your product. Yes, you could simply not fulfill
| these requests or not help these customers, but I think for
| most people it will still introduce stress. There may be people
| who can deal easily with this, but I think it's natural to be
| stressed by this and run after things that you shouldn't.
|
| Still I agree that it's probably possible to open-source
| without these problems and that this is not a complete
| compelling argument for every case. For me personally at least
| not open-sourcing at the beginning (like the author did) would
| probably be preferred as well for a solo-founded project.
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