[Nursie]

There's a third issue - support.

I worked for a place about 15 years ago which was trying desperately to retire its previous flagship product in favour of the new version. The new version was better written and more scalable, but the major value for them was that they had made a big mistake with the old one -

The gave away source code and allowed customers to customise the software, but they still honoured support contracts. This had turned into a huge cost, as engineers were having to go out to customer sites and spend days figuring out what the customer had done.

You can't effectively support what you can't see, so you can only really support OR allow modifications.

[slrz]

No sensible person is going to be mad with you for asking them to reproduce their issue without local customizations applied if they want you to help them with it.

Write it into your support contracts. Maybe offer smarter customers to review and sign off on their modifications in exchange for a reasonable fee.

These problems can be solved.

[bumholio]

Actually, it seems like a huge wasted opportunity. If a company is so invested in your software that it's willing to develop a custom patchset and an internal team to maintain it, then it would make a lot more sense to buy the service from the very people who wrote the software, that know it best and can pull together multiple customer wishlists into standard solutions. That's why the open source service model can exist, the original developer is uniquely positioned to profit from these synergies and deliver value for the customer.

So you can have your proprietary cake and eat it too, you can sell "NO WARRANTY, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED" commercial licenses at fixed prices, but at the same time, earn much more profitable support and customization contracts from select customers.

As for the people still opting to customize their own "NO WARRANTY" installation, of course they won't get and don't expect any support for their customization until they also buy a services license.

[Nursie]

> asking them to reproduce their issue without local customizations applied

This was a big, complex piece of software, a bank-level payment switch. It's possible that they couldn't run at all in their environment without the customisations applied.

> These problems can be solved.

I agree, if the contracts are well written and sensible :)