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by oblio
910 days ago
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Regarding your company: At some point the incentives become misaligned, though, we've seen this happen over and over. Someone proposes and sends a PR making huge quality of life improvements, it's shot down because it would reduce consulting revenue (the rejection reason is officially not this or not even stated at all). Someone proposes and sends a PR implementing advanced functionality that the core company sells as part of a paid extension, the PR is rejected (for obvious but not mentioned reasons). A cloud provider starts offering a service based on the software, the license is changed to non open source. Plus, these kinds of businesses generally only scale to mom and pop store or maybe 100 consultants. |
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Of course I would indeed expect a contribution that:
- tries to disable our licensing mechanism in our paid extensions
- tries to copy our paid extension code to our product or to a community extension
To be rejected upstream. But isn't it fair game? They can still fork the code and go start something on their own, it's one of the important features of open source. One can start a new extension repository and convince users to add it to their config, or even fork the product and provide this by default. But this is work, they'll have to maintain this, and will probably depend on us, in the end.
Most likely, we would welcome significant contributions and QoL improvements, we are only so many people for that much work to do, improvements would allow us to focus on something else. If someone outside the company is willing to maintain some feature that we currently offer for a price, it probably actually grow / improve the ecosystem and it would probably be welcomed, letting us focus on other things our customers want. People maintaining extensions or feature for our product would likely be friends. Of course you can't just dump some code and go away, that's not sustainable.
> Plus, these kinds of businesses generally only scale to mom and pop store or maybe 100 consultants.
That may be true. My company reached 60 people this year. Nextcloud is around 100. But not everyone wants to become too big. There are a lot of advantages in staying small-ish. For the CEO, a big company is also not the same fun as a 50 people company.