Open Source and Saying “No”
I say this nearly every time something like this is posted. The isn&#x27;t isn&#x27;t so much open source, it&#x27;s that no one is getting paid. We&#x27;re constantly relying on projects that we get for free where in esscence we&#x27;re relying on goodwill. So much so, that people say don&#x27;t add new features because you&#x27;re depending on the goodwill of that contributor and they may disappear. Which is basically the same was the open source maintainer may disappear.<p>Basically, this blog posts highlights why we should be paying for software libraries we use. All the downsides of proprietary code happens in open source. Open source projects don&#x27;t add features you need, they can release a new version that has breaking changes and stop supporting the old version, they can just disappear, etc. However, the reality is, very rarely does popular proprietary just stop getting updated. While that happens in most somewhat popular open-source libraries. You can go to most mature open-source libraries and you&#x27;ll see that the commit activity is down from when the project started. Many will say that&#x27;s because it&#x27;s feature complete. However, if you look at the open issues you&#x27;ll see lots of activity. Often the issue is that the original maintainer has lost interest, be it because life - love affairs, children, sickness, etc, or that they&#x27;ve got a new hobby - arts, music, new tech, etc. I don&#x27;t blame these maintainers, it&#x27;s free and they owe me nothing. But at the same time I blame the industry for making it so common to build on these libraries that literally promise nothing for production code that you&#x27;ll be extremely hard press to find a job that doesn&#x27;t require you to build on top of FOSS.<p>My prefered approach which I&#x27;m taking with my SaaS Boilerplate&#x2F;General functionality bundle is use source-available license. Namely BSL - Business Source License with an additional grant that if you make less than $5k per month you don&#x27;t need to pay. This allows the best of both worlds in my opinion. The ability to test it out, see it, use it for free in certain scenarios while making people who make money from it pay for it&#x27;s maintenance. The full details of this license and approach can be read in the FAQ <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;getparthenon&#x2F;parthenon#faq" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;getparthenon&#x2F;parthenon#faq</a>