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The aftermath of "No, 'Open Source' does not mean 'Includes Free Support'"
(raccoon.onyxbits.de)
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this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2020
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I’m not so sure. I think he has a point that if someone forks, he can still merge those changes back in and still work on things for his paying customers too. I think the number of people who are willing to write patches is a lot smaller than the number who are going to complain. He seems to welcome forks anyway (I’m sure his attitude would be, “let them provide the free support!”). This post is two years old, it might be interesting to see how his project is doing and how many forks there are.
There are a lot of users of open source projects who do act as if they are owed a resolution to every issue they encounter. While I don’t agree with the nuclear option I can’t really blame him.
Well it looks like nowadays they have public issues in their repo which seems like the authors decision and opinion changed. I think both ways are valid ways.
He actually complains about that too in another follow up post last year: https://raccoon.onyxbits.de/blog/case-against-public-bug-tracker-for-open-source-projects/
I suspect it is mostly ignored.
To be fair, it looks like he'd be much happier writing proprietary software in the first place. His goal is evidently to get a source of sustenance first, and to help the community with code second if at all. And in proprietary software it's already customary to expect no support whatsoever (sometimes not even patches to existing, already paid software) unless you pay for the privilege.
I don’t know that wanting to be paid for work necessarily means proprietary would be better. The FSF has always been very clear that making money is encouraged. He could easily still have a strong opinion that users should be able to review and modify things.
I don't know, I'm an open source dev too, but my time is valuable and I can't (and won't) just work for free on dozens of bug reports from a user that don't want to investigate first by themselves.
Yeah open source is great, but if you want support you have look at the code and read the damn documentation first ; I lost a lot of time just directing users to docs because they can't read.