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Comment by merlinscholz | Hacker News Reader

OnlyOffice's developers are... Questionable. Referring to this: https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/DocumentServer/issues/805

I don't really see the problem with this; it's a $149 (currently $99) one-time payment for a life-time license for 10 users, or it's free for contributors. That seems more than seems reasonable to me, and there needs to be some incentive for people to actually pay for developer time and hosting, because "ask nicely" doesn't really scale.

The communication wasn't ideal, which the OO people said in the issue, but to call it "questionable" ... meh. Try making a living from 100% no-restriction open source software like this and let me know how it goes.

For those who don't want to click: Mobile editing was removed from community edition and only in the $950 license edition. A poorly announced change which made he community mad.

Not only that. Someone wrote a script that activated the document server using only the open source version provided in the repo. A OO developer couldn't even grasp the concept that this was legally allowed any why anyone would want to do that (as a consequence of OO's own license changes). Shortly after that the issue was closed/locked.

Where do you get the $950 from? It's listed in the $149 (currently $100) "home server" lifetime license on their pricing page: https://www.onlyoffice.com/integration-edition-prices.aspx

950 EUR is from the first comment in the linked github issue. https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/DocumentServer/issues/805#issu...

Yeah, I saw that; the OO person in the replied mentioning the $100 price as well, so either something changed in the meanwhile (possibly as a response to the feedback?), the poster was mistaken, or I'm not understanding their pricing page correctly. As far as I can see for personal usage the "home server" plan should be grand.

Yea, that's where I got it. It's pretty confusing (not a good thing for pricing). I've forwarded this whole topic to my team - I'd like my company that builds FLOSS to avoid these types of issues. Something fun for us to review on Friday.

They need to make $. Source is licensed under AGPL 3, what else can they do? Are we all just freeloaders, never rewarding open source devs who spent so much effort on developing useful stuff?

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