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Comment by Justsignedup | Hacker News Reader

There is a huge cost. Maintainers have major time commitments, and we hear jobs looking for people's OSS contributions. Which is cool and all until you realize that some people work at Facebook on React and get to publish to OSS as their day job, and some people like myself have kids and a proprietary software job.

So I fully support companies offering their software free, except to run commercially.

To note, about 8 years ago I saw many companies and people open sourcing interesting software. This was for personal gains... They were a consulting company. ThoughtBot was a good example, they made tools, they made blogs about ruby on rails, they also sold their professional services. And it worked.

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Totally agree. Sometimes you just have to pay the bills. There are some projects that are extremely well done OSS but also have an 'Enterprise' side to them that's paid and offers more advanced features normally required by commercial entities:

1. Sidekiq (https://github.com/mperham/sidekiq) 2. Couchbase (https://www.couchbase.com)

interesting

what license would you even use for that - it seems everything here allows commercial

https://choosealicense.com/appendix

Here's one: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/

Aren’t Creaive Commons licenses not suitable for code? Can’t find a reference but they seemed pretty clear about that.

Correct, Creative Commons recommends using alternate licenses for code. See “Can I apply a Creative Commons license to software?”, https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-comm...

Creative Commons licenses are good for documentation and manuals.

You are correct. And yet I've found multiple cases in which they're used for code.

I guess the Fair Source License should fit in there:

https://fair.io/#license

This is basically "you're free to use the application and the source unless you're a company where 25 people or more will be using/modifying this software". Mind you, I see an issue with this where proving that the number of people are actually using the software is difficult. I'd prefer a version where it's just the number of people in the organisation in total.

I don't think I could use that software as a student. Even if I was considered independent of the school (which is unclear), my professor would not be, so I would not be able to use software under that license in a project for credit.

Did you mean ThoughtWorks?

I had heard of ThoughtBot, but not ThoughtWorks. Seems like both are relevant examples:

https://github.com/thoughtbot

https://github.com/thoughtworks

ThoughtWorks and ThoughtBot are different companies, of which TW is well-known due to Martin Fowler, the many debates about the relevance of TDD, agile practices, etc, and they have offices all over the world. They started work on tools, like CruiseControl, and open sourced this. To me it never felt like they made tools open source first, but rather a need that came to have them stay relevant as other, often times better Open Source-first tools came around. The same happened with GoCD.

ThoughtBot came around later, and feels much like a adhering to a lot of the similar cultural habits.

Note: I worked for TW, currently at Red Hat. Note 2: Somne of TW's projects under the other pillars are open source first, but aren't related to this topic.

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