[Uehreka]

I’d argue that if a company has a larger than normal dependency on keeping a project running (like a cloud provider with 1 million VMs running Debian or Debian-based OSes) they should hire a full time employee whose sole job is to work on it.

I think the basic rules still apply: You’re getting this software for free rather than paying for something expensive. Though you deal in the software, you get no guarantee of its fitness for any purpose. If you want a better guarantee of its fitness, either pay the current maintainers or hire someone good who can become a maintainer. OR choose open source projects where a BigCo like Microsoft or Google has hired people to work on it full time.

[AnonymousPlanet]

> You’re getting this software for free rather than paying for something expensive.

So open source is free as in beer, not free as in speech after all. And the reason a company might choose to use open source is solely because it's free, not because they can see the source code or alter it? Because that is why companies are in it, not because they were cheap for the small cash of a paid version. And they're in it because they can watch and choose those projects that are well maintained.

If the maintainer pulls a tantrum and acts unreliable that kills the project from the point of view of any serious user. Until someone else takes over maintenance or it is forked.

This "it's free so you get what you paid for, and if it's shit don't complain because it was free" really rubs me the wrong way. It's a very capitalist mindset that measures everything in money. If there is no money, there is probably no worth, so don't expect any. Accomplishment, dependability, positive net effect? No money, so don't expect it?

[bpt3]

> So open source is free as in beer, not free as in speech after all. And the reason a company might choose to use open source is solely because it's free, not because they can see the source code or alter it? Because that is why companies are in it, not because they were cheap for the small cash of a paid version. And they're in it because they can watch and choose those projects that are well maintained.

In general, developers aren't auditing the source code or modifying open source code; they're assembling open source packages to provide base functionality and combining that together with business logic and glue code to produce a product. So yes, companies are most commonly using open source because it's zero cost (and easily available), not because they can theoretically audit or modify it.

> If the maintainer pulls a tantrum and acts unreliable that kills the project from the point of view of any serious user. Until someone else takes over maintenance or it is forked.

There's no single definition of "serious user". There have been projects with no technical issues that are maintained by massive assholes that are widely used, so I would disagree with your statement here.

> This "it's free so you get what you paid for, and if it's shit don't complain because it was free" really rubs me the wrong way. It's a very capitalist mindset that measures everything in money. If there is no money, there is probably no worth, so don't expect any. Accomplishment, dependability, positive net effect? No money, so don't expect it?

1. Unsurprisingly, any discussion within the context of how businesses make decisions or should act is likely to revolve around money.

2. The fundamental issues is that there's a massive disconnect between the worth/value provided by a project to users and the value it provides to the creator.

3. The license dictates what users should expect as far as "what they get" from a library. It almost all cases with open source, they should expect to get nothing, and anything beyond that is a bonus.

[Uehreka]

> This "it's free so you get what you paid for, and if it's shit don't complain because it was free" really rubs me the wrong way. It's a very capitalist mindset that measures everything in money.

I mean like... yeah.

If I'm maintaining an open source project as a side gig or for fun, I might be able to review and merge some patches. But if the corporations that use my project submit a busload of PRs (or worse, just issues with no solutions) and I end up spending so much time on them that I have no time to work on my dayjob and make rent... that's not gonna work.

Now if those corporations each chuck a hundred bucks a month (less than the cost of a single Developer's Enterprise MSDN subscription) my way, then sure! I'll scale back my freelance web dev work and spend half my workweek dedicated to maintaining this project!

So yeah, I think the corporations who make money off open source projects should be kicking back a bit of money to those projects if they want an expectation of reliability. It doesn't have to be a ton of money either:

- If we're talking about a tiny header parsing library that needs occasional security patches, maybe expense a few bucks at the maintainer's Patreon so they can spend 10 hours a year on those patches.

- If we're talking about the web framework that underlies your big newspaper's CMS, maybe have a developer spend 20 hours a month pushing well made PRs to fix the problems you care about.

- If we're talking about an OS like Debian and you're AWS, maybe hire a 3 person team to work solely on keeping it secure.

[AnonymousPlanet]

What rubs me the wrong way is the notion that if it's for free it has no worth. This "free == shit" idea that is expressed in "you can use it but don't expect much of it because it's free". Maybe I'm just too much of an old school open source idealist.