Licensing discrimination and locked bugs aren't in the spirit of open source

[darkpixel]

Question

The recent dialogue on this issue has veered from questions about how the OSMF applies to the WiX Toolset to opinions on OSMF itself.

No, it hasn't.

a. If you want to discuss the Open Source Maintenance Fee itself, see the OSMF Discussions.

Nope. I don't care what license someone chooses to release their work under.

b. If you have additional questions about how the OSMF applies to WiX, feel free to ask on our Discussions.

Nope, there aren't any questions there either. It does apply to WiX because the decision has already been made.

I was simply trying to convey what I think is a somewhat common attitude from users and companies and show you how it impacted me and the company I worked for.

But great job locking the bug. I don't think I've ever locked a bug in my life other than as a test, and the only time I see bugs locked in the wild are when projects use stalebot to close and lock bugs because there's "no activity" (...from the developers) or when someone doesn't like the direction of the conversation. It's a lock button, not a disagree button @robmen.

Anyways, like I said, I don't care what license someone chooses to release their work under...but I do find all the hurdles people and companies go through to pretend they're still open source a bit disingenuous.

I don't need answers to these questions, but you might want to think about them:

Why was Wix open source in the first place?

Would you have started Wix if any of the open source tools you ended up taking advantage of had decided to force you to buy a license because you earn more than...say...$1,000 USD every month, or would you have started out closed-source or simply not started at all?

Why arbitrarily discriminate at $10,000 in profit? Everyone has seen the famous picture of the Zimbabwe $1,000,000,000,000,000 bill. Why not $1,000,000,000? Or $10?

Before you decided to discriminate against people/companies earning a random amount of money, did you set up monthly donations to all the open source projects you (or Wix) uses to ensure they don't suffer the same burnout/maintenance burden?

How about after (hopefully) some people/companies start paying the license fee? Will you turn around then and donate that money to other open source projects?

Again...don't misunderstand me--it's your code and you have the right to license it however you choose. For me it's about the open source principle of end-user freedom and nondiscrimination.

Like I said earlier, I switched to InnoSoft in about an hour. They don't discriminate because the company I work for managed to become profitable after years of hard work and low wages, and then after getting nuked during COVID and 5 years later are finally turning a profit again, paying employees a good wage, and trying to hire more people.
All InnoSoft did was ask. They didn't demand. They didn't play licensing games.

I believe in it so strongly and the entire discussion annoyed the crap out of me so much that I sent them my travel reimbursement this month.

Open Source Maintenance Fee

• I (or an organization I'm a member of) pay the Open Source Maintenance Fee by sponsoring the wixtoolset project because I support the maintainers.

[wmanning]

It is open source, the code is licensed as "Copyright (c) .NET Foundation and contributors.
This software is released under the Microsoft Reciprocal License (MS-RL) (the "License"); you may not use the software except in compliance with the License."

Except the generated output/artifacts (nuget) is under a different license. If you don't want to pay the fee for the output can't you just fork it and create the artifacts yourself? I can see it is a bit of friction to do that but I think it still meets the definition of open source.

[darkpixel]

I'm licensing my next open source project as "It's open source, but you aren't allowed to download or run it. No really, it's open source...you can totally run it by bringing up each file on github and then manually typing it into your own development environment and then compile it yourself."

Sure, it still meets the definition of open source, but it literally would make me an a**.