Comment by vikmals
2 years ago
The problem is that you ask for money on OSS. Companies use OSS because it is free. If you try to force them to contribute or pay money, there will always be someone who has more passion than you to do it for free. At this point, just pass on your OSS project that is highly demanded but you have no passion for.
Do companies use open source because it's free?
Cost may be a component. But not the only component, and cost doesn't have to be binary. You can charge and still be less than the alternatives.
The main benefit of using open source in a corporate environment is that there is usually zero paperwork involved. As long as the licence is approved, have at it! As soon as you pay money for something, either a fee or a donation, you've got to email someone. Almost certainly someone outside your team.
Companies don't make decisions on individual OSS dependencies. Individual engineers and engineering teams do. That's if anyone actually spares a thought at all (eek)!
This 1000%.
It's not my money. Why would I particularly care if we have to pay for some software?
But it is my time and effort. If I have to go through a lot of red tape and politics just to use some library then ... screw that. Doesn't matter how much it costs.
That's one of the reasons it generally makes no sense to offer enterprise software for a low cost. Even if it only costs $1, your users still have the red tape to deal with. You may as well make it cost $1k, so you actually make some money from the few users who fight the tape.
Only if they don't care about liability.
Those that care, CI/CD only fetches from internal repos, and stuff is only uploaded into them after an audit.
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Also proprietary software often is has protections (DRM/NDA/License keys) which add their own hassle.