Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by to11mtm 23 days ago
I think I know the pattern they are describing, and it's a semi-unfortunate one.

People make a fairly-complex open source thing. Due to the complexity for certain environments/cases, the author(s) have a commercial support option.

Consumers from bigorg use it, and wind up opening issues wanting free help for their niche use case, no they don't want to get a support contract, but this subset of the user base causes a lot of churn dealing with communication, politely closing such issues (after all, you want to just be polite about support options, not drive them away!)...

And sometimes, it becomes easier to just flip the license.

In the .NET ecosystem, it's come up frequently. There's the cases where I get it; PDF is hell (iTextSharp), Imaging is hell (ImageSharp), Auth is hell (IdentityServer).

But then there's the cases where I just shrug my shoulders (MediatR has plenty of alternatives) or get happy it gives me permission to gleefully get rid of a poorly used lib (AutoMapper).
1 comments
foxglacier 22 days ago
It must be having their mindset set wrong for the situation. Are they a business out to make money? Then suck it up and accept they have to smooch their leads to convert them into paying customers. Or are they trying to build a community of altruistic developers and helpful users? Then just ignore any support requests that are too much. It's pretty common for open source devs to just leave issues sitting around without even acknowledging them or to close them without any comment.

I might be biased though because I enjoy helping users. I also sell commercial support for my software and sometimes both paying and unpaid users have big niche requests that go too far for my liking so I stop helping them on that. Sometimes I do feel bad that I spent so much energy on them but it's not bitterness and I blame myself for not saying "no" sooner, not the customer for simply asking. People are allowed to ask for things.

link