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One thing people are not taking into account is that many developers now have less time and are working a lot more because AI makes it seem it should be possible to hit those deadlines, etc.

Also, many programers have spent their entire funds on tokens, so neither are left with extra money nor time.

Acquisitions change priorities and layoffs put the squeeze on people. AI is for sure in the mix there, but open source decay is a result of no room in budgets for anything but maximizing revenue.
I really wish projects like this didn't fall through the cracks and continued to be funded. The struggles of OSS are too real.
True.. I truly wish wish we had better open-source license and more open-source projects adopt it..

Tiered pricing license... tiering based upon annual company revenues... should start super low for small companies (free for individuals), and jump to thousands of dollars per year for 10+ milion revenue companies.

I understand that this might not fully be in the spirit of open-source, but, what's happening currently is way worse.. where giant companies rip off the hardwork of open-source software maintainers without compsensating them adequately.

> Tiered pricing license... tiering based upon annual company revenues... should start super low for small companies (free for individuals), and jump to thousands of dollars per year for 10+ milion revenue companies.

Too complicated. Make it GPL (not MIT) and offer dual licensing.

Those corps that need it but are GPL-phobic can have a different license, and can pay for it.

Sigh. Bane of my existence is any service which does this.

My org theoretically makes hundreds of millions, unfortunately none of that money is ours. So I get forced into a procurement process for anything that costs more than (ridiculously small limit), and get stuck using the worst in class because it's cheaper.

It would be great if github or someone did something to support licenses like this. So procurement was more like a cloud spend. Companies could put caps on the monthly spend for the projects they use. Organizations should be used to paying for products from individuals just like how they do from megacorporations.
Would a third party 'productising' FOSS be acceptable to the FOSS community?

for example, adding support, bug fixes, corp-friendly licencing and pricing models, private code/package repos, code/package signing, etc. Providing biz ppl to be available for meetings, legal protection, PII, etc.

To foster goodwill, they could even send some of the profit back to the original maintainer, ala pikapods: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31312682

I'm not suggesting productizing but if someone skimmed 0.5-5% off of some of my packages licenses and gave me the rest without me having to do anything I would be happy with that. I think the important thing would be, customers would likely expect less support so licenses should be cheaper.

People who don't want tiered licenses could definitely just mit it and walk away of course.

I do like the idea of paying back the original maintainers otherwise people could sandbag projects to fork them later.

> skimmed 0.5-5% off of some of my packages licenses

What do you mean by this? A FOSS product that has a paid packaged version?

So... Spotify but for OSS?

I'm not sure this worked out as well as we thought it might do for the musicians.

May be inconvenient to you, but the point of licenses like that is that inconvenience to companies that aren't willing to pay for the work.
I think the point was that this is a company that is willing to pay for the work, but corporate procurement doesn't work like that.

If you don't have a discretionary spending limit that will accommodate it, then trying to get OSS through procurement is difficult. Who is providing the support contract? What level of indemnity insurance is the supplier covered by? Can you get a spread of three quotes from competitive providers?

Not to mention that if the supplier isn't VAT/GST registered, the accounts department can be operationally incapable of accepting an invoice or issuing payment.

Not malicious, this is best practice for a large organisation that needs to prove that it is not doing fraud. But it does present a huge obstacle to buying from small organisations, startups, and one-person OSS maintainers.

Agree. Does solving this itself a good product idea? A company specializing in making these deals happen? Taking on the legal and corporate aspects? Kinda like freelancer platforms work.., but, more corporate forcused?
I'm not a corporate procurement specialist - I've just hit this wall before. So I might be talking out of my arse in terms of solutions.

One way around it is that you get an existing consultancy, who is already on the corporate approved suppliers list and has jumped through all the hoops, to resell the product. They take a hefty cut, usually, but can also pay more punctually (in general large corp purchasing departments negotiate/demand looong invoice payment deadlines).

That still leaves more problems - like the sales cycle, it can take two years or more for a large corp to go from an "we want to buy this" from a department head to an actual purchase order from procurement. You could short-cut that if you were already an approved supplier, and had a team who knew the process and could respond much more quickly to the insane amount of bureaucracy involved.

You'd need to be large (large corps hate buying from small companies), well-funded (so there's no argument that you'll run out of funds, or not be able to compensate them if something goes wrong), heavily insured (see above), with a team who knows their way around everything that a large procurement department could throw at you. You could pro-actively try getting on the approved suppliers list for every large corp in a sector, and then advertise your services to OSS/startups/small corps, who would be your customer.

Not stupid, certainly. I've heard worse ideas ;)

If none of the money is yours it means it is not your profit. A license expressed in terms of profit instead of revenue would be suitable for you.

I thought a while back there were some products that had dual licenses, a fairly open license for private use, use in small companies, but requiring purchase and/or contribution back when used in something like a cloud providers SaaS.

I like open source, but I also can understand the nagging feeling when your (and your contributors work) is used for pure corporate greed.

> If none of the money is yours it means it is not your profit. A license expressed in terms of profit instead of revenue would be suitable for you.

I like this idea, but the devil is in the details. "profit" is less defined than revenue. You have to specify your accounting principles. What counts as an expense that deducts from revenue to help define profit?

It's not impossible, but there's a lot more variance depending on locality, business structure, etc. than there is with just "revenue".

Of course, I suspect it all comes down to whether the entity offering the license is large enough and well-enough legally armed to force an audit of the organization taking the license. If they're not able to do that, it's all self-reporting anyway.

And even if everything is "legit", plenty of corporations make close to no profit because they're "licensing" or paying whatever other fees to a different company that magically happen to track whatever cash they have on hand at the end of the year.

See all these multinationals paying close to no taxes in the countries where they operate.

So. If we fix that loophole we both get proper tax revenue and we get to fund OSS better. I say win-win. Although it will be hard to implement in practice.
> If none of the money is yours it means it is not your profit

Maybe they mean their org makes a lot of money the money for their parent corp, but little of that ( goes into / is reflected in ) their own orgs budget?

Sounds like whoever is getting that money is hamstringing your organization on purpose so they can keep more of your money.
Is there a measurement that would work better for your organizations setup?
The project is being abandoned because the maintainer is tired of working for free. They said that they hoped someone would fork it, change the name, and pick up where it was left off.

Why would anyone do that? If the person who was most passionate about it for over a dozen years has given up because it was never worth the trouble; what fool would think things will be different going forward?

This is the curse of OSS.

> what fool would think things will be different going forward?

> This is the curse of OSS.

There are examples of failing forks. And there are examples of forks that became better than the original. It is not possible to generalize this into one or the other solely via a curse-of-OSS conclusion. Funding will always be an issue; but funding is not necessarily the main or only criterium as to whether a project fails or succeeds.

An alternative reading is that after 13 years dedicated to a single project, the original author is simply burnt out on it, but a new maintainer can start with fresh passion that will last a number of years.

Just because someone gets tired of working on something eventually doesn't mean everyone else will immediately feel the same way.

Did you read the notice on the git hub site? I think he clearly states that he wanted to continue to work on the project, but could not justify it after sources of funding failed to materialize.
Sure, but a new maintainer might have different needs. The original maintainer doesn’t have the time now to do the work for free, since they have to also have a job to pay the bills. A new maintainer might have more free time, at least for a while…
They said they imagined it would (I read as "might") be forked, and if it were, please don't use their name for it.

I don't think they are "hoping" someone else will take it, exactly. They're just done with it. That's how I read it, they liked working on it, but it wasn't financially sustainable, the project is now over, and my reading is they are sad about it.

While I tend to agree with the line of thinking in this thread that the ethos of open source (and the web writ large) have been taken advantage of by capitalism, I can't quite see this: things belong to a time and place in one's life. The creator feels like his time with this project is at an end, but why would that be an impediment to someone who needs a package like this stepping up and maintaining it? Better to do that than build a replacement from scratch (most likely). And more likely to attract new sponsorship by being a reliable steward of a known name (albeit with a suffix or something).
> have been taken advantage of by capitalism

“And many programmers, they say to me, “The people who hire programmers demand this, this and this. If I don't do those things, I'll starve.” It's literally the word they use. Well, you know, as a waiter, you're not going to starve. So, really, they're in no danger.”

- Richard Stallman in 2001 admitting his ideology can’t explain how a programmer can eat

In my opinion, though this is HN heresy, the free software ideology and ethos was naïve, utopian, and clueless about how power works, from day 1. His dream is literally structurally impossible, capitalism or no capitalism, so long as humans need money to eat.

> and clueless about how power works, from day 1

September 26th, 1983:

"Dear Mr. Stallman, it is I, gjsman-1000, a time-traveler sent back to tell you to rethink your upcoming GNU project because you are currently clueless about how power works. Yes, you may be able to code up an impressive prototype compiler and revise it until your fingers bleed. Yes, a decade later some zealous followers may follow your lead and maintain it on the bleeding edge. Yes, two decades later others will perhaps start an open source compiler project to wrest control from your successful compiler that is largely maintained without your direct input. And yes, three decades later your compiler team may even merge in new features and improvements that came from the other compiler. But heed my ominous warning: four decades later I will not be able to remember my original point, for time travel is dangerous business and has adverse effects on short and long term memory."

What is RMS quote supposed to prove here? We can always find new work? Is that it? If so -- not so fast. When you have a family, your freedom is severely hampered. Most companies understand this and abuse it.

And yes the free software ideology is as naive as a puppy. Every serious individual understands this. Most HN-ers are in a fairly specific bubble (income brackets, geo-location, political leanings, upbringing, the whole package); of course to them this is "heresy". This is well-understood. Happily for me and many others around here, karma farming is not the goal so we don't mind getting some gray arrow treatment every now and then.

Communism occurs in part whenever a need is met or an economic decision is made without using value tokens. Direct access to resources without money happens every day (e.g. anyone using Linux rather than a proprietary OS, or exercising in a public park rather than a for-profit gym). The only thing keeping other products & services hoarded behind paywalls is devotion to capitalist ideology. It literally is a problem of capitalism. The structure of the world outside of people's brains has nothing to do with it.
I mean, repeated claims about starving programmers I see HN are indeed ridiculously dramatic. They show up in relation to open source, but mostly as arguments why all those highly paid people just must do unethical things, else they will starve.

I am not even fan of Stallman. I think it is ok to produce close software. But starving argument is just not it.

It is my experience that most people work hard to 'get ahead' and not to merely survive. Yes, we will work for subsistence wages if no other option exists, but the goal is to thrive.

Some who are opposed to capitalism seem to think that anyone who wants to trade their talents and hard work for more than the minimum, are exploiting anyone who wants or needs their product.

The struggles of living in an economic system while completely rejecting that system and pretending it isn't there.
There is no evidence of any of that.

He was paid to work on it. That stopped, he continued to work on it in the hopes he could find someone who would hire him to work on it.

That wasn’t true, no one has funded it.

So due to the economic system he no longer maintains it.

That’s your economic system at work. No one is pretending it isn’t there, this is the outcome of it

That's actually not the problem. The problem is that the conventional funding model for open source does not make sense and nobody has the resources to provide a financial product that actually works, since the projects with a single maintainer are too small of a market to be worth serving for classic financial institutions like banks.

The business model is as follows: Open source maintenance produces recurring costs (developer salary, infrastructure costs, etc) but these costs are fixed and do not scale with the number of users, only with the development effort. This means the ideal financing structure would be a cost plus system where the maintainer gets paid a salary and the customers (businesses) are spreading the cost among each other so that each business ends up paying less than if they had built or maintained the project in-house.

The problem here is that the costs are variable and depend on the number of participants and their individual willingness to spend money and how that effects the viability of the project as a whole. Participating businesses need some sort of guarantee that they won't be stuck with all of the costs and that there are other participants who will chip in. At the same time, once there is a sufficient number of participants, the participating businesses don't want to overpay. They may commit to a monthly worst case bill of $5000, but if the total bill is $10000 and there are 100 participating businesses so that each business could only pay $100, said big spender would want the option to lower their spending down to $100 if possible and let others carry more of the financial burden.

With this sort of arrangement, funding open source software would be rational, since the amount you save by freeloading is insignificant compared to the risk of the project being discontinued due to freeloading.