Products aren't projects, which has confused people for decades.
If open source products retreating from some of the "freedom" elements bothers you, then you should be focusing your ire on the megacorporations and overfunded startups who simply refuse to contribute to the financial viability of the products that sustain them.
For some reason "we" celebrate the exploitative, though, so I guess that's out.
Yep. The author complains that there used to be plucky startups with Open Core business models who've now gone "extinct", while simultaneously sharpening their pitchforks because those same companies got successful and _slightly_ amended their licenses to prevent loosing revenue against IaaS giants so that they can, in turn, continue innovating. I guess money grows on trees where they live.
The projects I think of most are redis and ansible—both of which I've used extensively, and quickly went from 'neat thing I spotted on Hacker News' to 'now it's a startup', then a few years later 'it's just another corporation, the open source project is buried somewhere deep inside'.
The projects weren't as much open core as they were literal open source projects made to solve some problem the author had with other existing tooling. The open core part was injected when the startup decided it had to turn into a platform to sustain the beefy staffing budgets while they figured out how to generate revenue off something that was freely available.
I'm not sure what the alternative is or what you are advocating. Antirez stopped working on Redis 4 years ago. We were lucky someone created Redis "for the love of the game". Now before you there are a couple options
1. Antirez2 pops up and works on Redis because they love working on Redis
2. Someone is incentivized, with money, to work on Redis.
(1) didn't happen, so we must go with (2), and with (2) comes the problem of the actual business model that will be used to sustain (2).
A. Donations/Support contracts
B. Open "Core" aka I'm the only one allowed to sell this as SaaS.
Method (A) has shown to be an abject failure while AWS takes your revenue. Companies have successfully chosen method (B). Either you have a method (C) in mind, or you just aren't being reasonable in asking people to work on OSS for free. You can be mad about the "rugpull", but between the choice of "rugpull" and abandon the project, I don't see how "rugpull" is the worse option
There's plenty of people / groups willing to work on Redis without direct monetary compensation, as the plethora of forks have shown. They don't need to be 'asked'.
The only problem is that the people who bought the copyright now want an ROI.
We saw this with xz. Many, including me, suggested this is an example of how paying developers could reduce likelihood of attack and speed up progress. These people make these products in their spare time. You know... After work. So they clearly would rather do that than their job. But a common response was "what, so we could pay the hacker?" Which missed the entire point.
I'm also reminded by a relatively recent episode of either PIMA or Freakanomics (I forget which) where Steve asks Bill Gates why charities don't pay as well as corporate gigs and Gate's response was "it's a charity".
We seem to forget that things take work. Just because someone does that work on their own time and without asking for compensation doesn't mean that they don't deserve it. It just means their more passionate.
If open source products retreating from some of the "freedom" elements bothers you, then you should be focusing your ire on the megacorporations and overfunded startups who simply refuse to contribute to the financial viability of the products that sustain them.
For some reason "we" celebrate the exploitative, though, so I guess that's out.