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by sametmax 2951 days ago
> Forever?

You can have support forever.

You just can't have it __for free__ forever.

There are companies out there that will happily sell you the service.

You already get an amazing tech for free, and support of 2 decades in you take all the 2.X branch in consideration (e.g: 4 times the ubuntu LTS). You complaining at this point is just insulting the community.

I find it infuriating. When the JS or Ruby community breaks stuff, they give a few weeks notice, and a few months to migrate. Nobody complains. Python give 10 years, a lot of tooling and tutorials, and some people keep complaining. This is where being too nice is a problem.

In 2020, I'll triple my price for any work on 2.7. I'm done being fair to people with such ingratitude.

2 comments

>In 2020, I'll triple my price for any work on 2.7. I'm done being fair to people with such ingratitude.

This doesn't make any sense. You're not running a charity. If you can get customers with the tripled price, then do triple it. If you can get customers with a 100x price, you'd be a fool not to 100x your price.

If, on the other hand, you can't get customers for triple the price, then tripling it will just make people go to someone else. You're not hurting anybody either way...

> This doesn't make any sense. You're not running a charity. If you can get customers with the tripled price, then do triple it. If you can get customers with a 100x price, you'd be a fool not to 100x your price

You say that because you see business as only a gateway to make money. But if you work in the libre community, you'll see that ethics and promotion of the libre is a very important part of it. It's also why FOSS people make less money.

>But if you work in the libre community, you'll see that ethics and promotion of the libre is a very important part of it

For how many people? Most major FOSS people I know work in large companies from Red Hat to IBM and Joyent. Heck, speaking of Python, Guido worked for Google and Dropbox.

And most of the others are volunteers.

Besides, I wouldn't call "tripling the price" when you don't like the client using an older version exactly "ethical".

Have you talked to the client? Do you know their costs and externalities for a 2.7 -> 3 rewrite of their existing (and working code)? It's not like they are capricious and want to use 2.7 out of malice.

many companies have made much money from the free work of volunteers, yet those exploiting companies are blameless, while proponents of a useful and stable technology are glibly mocked?