Introduce the Open Source Maintenance Fee

[chrpai]

I was wondering what everyones thoughts on #8974 are. (Introduce the Open Source Maintenance Fee).

[robmen]

I think the Open Source Maintenance Fee is a good idea. It is a simple solution to fund Open Source Projects to sustain them as Open Source. If successful, it will absolutely help us continue to maintain the WiX Toolset.

I also think it is important that the WiX Toolset take a leadership position here. We played an important part in changing Microsoft's attitude toward Open Source over 20 years ago. We can once again lead by example and (hopefully) demonstrate a sustainable path forward other Open Source maintainers may follow.

If anything, I wish we'd started down this path 20+ years ago and put all Open Source Projects on a more sustainable foundation from the very beginning.

[wmanning]

It does make sense to have a fee on the outputs of the software (nuget packages). It's a convenience. The fee seems reasonable for the most part. Seems to be high step up between the first two groups but still $480 a year for a mid-sized company seems reasonable.

I think though there needs to be better support from Github. Github is too public. In my opinion the source code can be public but it would be better to give maintainers the ability to control who can create issues and pull requests by restricting to certain users and/or putting it behind a paywall. I mean for write access, not read access. I can see the time spent reviewing pull requests and issues being very annoying and time consuming for maintainers. For discussions it would be good to give maintainers the ability to filter out what they don't want to see; if the community wants to help each other, I support that, but maintainers don't have to be involved if they don't want to. Say have a user only section and a member only section.

In the FAQ https://opensourcemaintenancefee.org/consumers/faq/:
"Also, if you choose to not pay the Maintenance Fee, but find yourself returning to check on the status of issues or review answers to questions others ask, you are still using the project and need to pay the Maintenance Fee."

I don't necessary agree with the above statement. Github is free to use. It could just drive people to use other discussion forums.

If all open source projects started to add a fee, cost might get excessive but also maybe that would spark discussions. I don't think a fee can be the only way as less popular projects wouldn't receive enough and still have to deal with public drivebys. Github will have to make changes as well.

[chrpai]

I understand the struggle of dealing with certain types of users but it feels elitest to say only blessed people can contibute issues and PRs. To have to pay to submit a PR seems wierd to me.

Fundamentaly I think there are two distinct problems: 1) Funding 2) Consumer Relations Pain... unless #1 can bring in a ton of money to hire a couple of DevRel personal and a project manager to run triage, I think #2 won't be solved.

[wmanning]

Maybe could work like stackoverflow where you need a certain amount of karma to do issues or PRs...

[Marc-Smaak]

We recently started upgrading our installer from WiX 3 to WiX 6 and where confronted with this maintenance fee. Although I fully support paying something for all the good work done I want to raise the problem it causes for a mid sized company if om working for.
We have in total 4000 employees of which 500+ are SW developers so for sure we fall in the 100+ category using $60/month
However as many companies we are organized in multiple SW teams this will be a maintenance fee handled at the corporate level. There isn't such a thing as a corporate credit card at this level, we would require a quotation, send in a PO and get the maintenance subscription verifiable delivered so a good receipt is created. After all these steps money will be transferred. Therefore an annual instead of a monthly subscription makes more sense also to limit the additional internal costs to get this in place. I do not find any information how to do this. Is anything planned to make the Open source maintenance fee more suitable for mid sized companies?
Currently it might be cheaper for us to build from the sources but I would not want my resources to spend time on this if it already exists.

[robmen]

GitHub Sponsors supports using an Invoice to pay. This is how Microsoft pays their maintenance fee.

Note: One criticism of GitHub Sponsors Invoice is that there is a minimum of $5,000 to open the invoice. I'm collecting feedback from procurement teams as they learn about OSMF and GitHub Sponsors and communicating with the GitHub Sponsors team. Feel free to reach out to me directly if you have feedback to share privately.

[Marc-Smaak]

Thank you @robmen good to know this option is available. Will reach out inside our organization how much interest there is in WiX 6.0

[chrpai]

It's not just $5,000... it's $5,000 for three years for a total of $15,000. Now there's a strong argument to do such a nobel thing but imagine the work to get all the various stakeholders to lead and coordinate such a shift. Mean while every time I get a group or FTEs together to discuss it I'm spending more then I care to think about.

IMHO, no research is needed. Most people wouldn't be at liberty to discuss it anyways. Trust me when I say it's a problem. What is needed is the ability for us to approach FG and say please send me an invoice for 3 years of $60 so I can get you paid. My attempts to do that so far have been met with go to sponsorships. If I can't get past that then I have to stay on 5.0.2 forever or find another installer tool or fork and build the project myself.

[Marc-Smaak]

Fully agree, the internal costs are making the solution of compiling ourselves more tempting (also work but more interesting than discussion payments) and accept we do not get any support. It is not my preferred solution because I do want to pay for what we use but not for the whole enterprise on my budget.

[robmen]

Note: I am talking with the GitHub Sponsors about this exact issue. The Microsoft Build conference was last week (which was the focus for a lot of key people at GitHub), and this week is a short week due to US holiday. I'm confident we will find something that works well.

[robmen]

PS: If you want to email me directly the exact issues facing your exact company (or publish it here if you want to be public about it) that helps me be very precise with the requests to the GitHub Sponsors team. It is much more compelling to say, "The procurement team at Xyz Company has this requirement." I can guess based on conversations but real requests from procurement professionals that are not proxied via developers works best.

This was a very similar process with lawyers and Open Source way back when. Developers proxying lawyer requests actually confused the issue and direct communication with lawyers helped a lot. :)

[Marc-Smaak]

Hi @robmen
Thank you for the offer to communicate directly with the procurement team. Unfortunately at this moment it will not work our compony is on the transition form Bosch (400k employees) to Keenfinity (4k employees) and there are many more important topics to discuss by procurement. In a few month I hope things are clearer. I will already start a discussion with our management how we want to handle this cost wise. I will also mention it will come-up in future more often so we better prepare us ;-)