Continuing the discussion from Bitwarden going proprietary? - #17 by Anon47486929
Worth noting that Proton is a nonprofit so (to my understanding) they only really need to make enough to pay the bills, whereas BW is VC-funded and therefore must return a profit.
Proton is still a for profit company, but the largest shareholder is now a non-profit organization. There are still shareholders expecting a profit and Proton has not clarified how much of the for-profit company the non-profit controls. It could still be the largest shareholder while controlling less than half of the for-profit company.
Offtopic but I don’t know why you guys hype “non-profit” so much. Rado is also non-profit, I don’t see them selling their watches for cheap.
The idea is not lack of profit. Being a non-profit allows activist/expert board of directors to exist who are not answerable to shareholders or corporate pressures, who can push the corporate side to toe the line.
Swiss non-profits are slightly better with them having a legal duty to maintain the mission they were created with (but all these terms are vague as hell).
Nobody rational sees non-profits and thinks free stuff.
Or Non-profits are a way to avoid certain legal liabilities. Or it’s just a marketing term.
Let’s end this conversation here.
That’s not the case, but definitely there is certain amnesia about costs and expecting to get paid for hard work in a lot of privacy-oriented discussions.
Another FOSS project, proving that it’s not viable to earn enough money to sustain itself. Most users using FOSS software never donate/pays for the Project, Nor do they want ads in those softwares or might use adblockers to block ads on those softwares and when the software finally either shuts down or go proprietary, makes shocked pickachoo face. Some then even have audacity to harass developers online. If the product is really essential, they may still use any tool in their disposal to block the software from making money. I think it’s a high time where people in FOSS community should understand that money is required for regular development and maintainance of a software and support their favourite projects with monetary support . Yes, some people may start FOSS projects as hobby projects, unless those projects really have some pretty cool way of earning money, the project is not something to be relied on as it can be EOL anytime as most open source software comes with no warranty nor the developer owes anything to anyone when they have an open source software.
FOSS is not a business model. It is a Go-To-Market.
If popular FOSS projects are struggling, that isn’t on anyone. It is just the nature of the beast. Their failure to monetize is not on BigTech. It is another matter that these projects have to compete with BigTech. In fact, FOSS is a great way to do so. Especially, if one is out to commoditize whatever it is that’s making money / building a moat for the incumbents.
There is also a section of FOSS developers who rather not monetize nor maintain popular projects. Again, not on BigTech.
Non-FOSS licensing (like with FUTO or HashiCorp), or users not adequately sponsoring FOSS projects (like with F-Droid or OpenSSL) is hence not to blame. Discontinued / hostile FOSS projects could be forked (like with CyanogenMod & Fossify) or replacements rewritten by others willing to step up (like with VSCode & BoringSSL).
Going predatory on existing users (by going proprietary after gaining market share via FOSS) is the actual problem (of greedily wanting to have the cake and eat it too). Everything else is an excuse.
Yeah it’s not the fault of users for not supporting the product. Obviously every developer owns a Lamborghini and is just doing community service. I get it why users should feel entitled to not contribute in success or failure of the software.
Can’t speak for others but I run 2 mildly popular FOSS projects. And we do see ourselves as doing “community service”, if you will.
Users do contribute, by submitting bug reports, writing reviews & recommendations, requesting features, helping other users, doing translations, sending heartfelt “thank you” DMs & emails. Contributions needn’t be only monetary.
For privacy respecting applications, bug reports are amazing. It’s hard to find every bug and edge case. And documentation is always tedious work that is definitely appreciated.
People just aren’t ready to accept that lack of money is a business problem, and does not become a user problem just because the project is FOSS.
A lot of folks still think that FOSS projects are:
Neither is true. Both happen only for projects that actually bring enough value to end users and actively incentivize them to do the above.
If it’s not a user problem then why do people complain when the project they love is either being discontinued or having their business model changed.
If they are not entitled to be grateful or supportive then they don’t have any entitlement to be critics as well.
But that’s not how things work in real life. A business and users have a unique relationship that is not easy to understand.
A business ought to provide value to customers in return of some value from the users as well which is usually monetary profit unless it’s a NON Profit or charity or something like that.
If Foss project is not a business and merely a hobby project then fine they can just provide everything for free but when the same project grows from a hobby to business at that point it’s a give and take relationship.
I am not an expert in business but recently have started a major in this field and I’m just sharing this knowledge from a business side of perspective.
Take Firefox for example, they started out as hobby project and was completely free but as soon as the company grows they shifted to for-profit mozilla corporation and strike search deals to keep the project alive at scale to fund various developers on board. Now coming back to your logic if most people are not entitled to support mozilla monetarily (most people don’t donate) then what gave them entitlement to criticise them when company makes a bad move. They recently bought an AD company FYI, and we all know why. Most Users will not donate willingly, it’s better to create another ad based business to keep funding the project if the search deal goes down in future. This is what happens when users feel they are not entitled to support their favourite project.
Yeah heartfelt messages do help a lot. But they don’t put food on the table 
You are not making the argument you think you are making. So many fallacies and assumption, let’s break them down one by one:
Because the project sold them the product (sold here is not always the monetary portion, but also the marketing portion) as FOSS and monetarily free. So users of a service are entitled to complain when service changes it’s terms of use.
But they have. Let me give you an example: Just because Protonmail exists, does not mean that they also deserve users (who can opt for Gmail, Tuta, etc. too). But it does mean that Protonmail users are entitled to complain about changes in terms of use of Protonmail. Is the difference clear now? Service is not entitled to users or their contributions just because it exists, but users of the service are entitled to critique any changes in it.
I’d request you to not lay sole claim to “how things work in real life”, since others and I too live in the real life. The relationship between user and service might be hard for some to understand. Others perfectly understand what the relationship is. Saying otherwise is a cop-out.
Finally something resembling actual discussion. Of course it’s a discussion to have if charities and non-profits have to or don’t have to return value (in my opinion, they have to return value. If I donate to a wildlife conservation charity, I expect them to do wildlife conservation). But FOSS projects are neither charities, nor are they non-profits, although some are owned by non-profits. So I don’t really understand where this argument comes from?
Nobody is arguing that FOSS does not need to make money. You are misunderstanding the argument. Let me restate: If a project is sold to the end user (monetarily or marketing wise) as FOSS, then they should either be what they claim to be, or not claim that they are FOSS. But often, some projects try to claim to be FOSS, yet are not actually FOSS. This is misleading.
Look into Netscape and how Firefox came to be. Firefox wasn’t a made out of shed project. It was a way to compete with Microsoft.
Again, I don’t think you read the actual arguments anyone has made here and latched on to the imaginary argument that no one said of FOSS projects should not be making money.
Exactly the response I expected, considering my response as fallacies and assumptions.
Most companies do tell users when they change their terms of use. Google has been telling us for years before finally transitioning to manifest v3. Similarly many companies do inform users and give them time to reflect (move to new service) if they wish. It’s not like that you signed up and paid for something and next hour they said “congratulations we have implemented our new terms and conditions immediately”, except if it’s a scam lol.
Is that so? So a user who is currently the user of service is allowed to critique it. Then why so many people critique mozilla’s fakespot, pockets, AI and new ad company when they are not users of it. Or Chrome for example. Most people in privacy and open source community who don’t use chrome (might use another chromium based browser like brave) still critique chrome when they make a bad move, even if they’re not a user of it. Why? Your logic doesn’t fit here.
I agree that they don’t, but it’s assumed by a lot of people in privacy and open source communities that foss projects are non profit projects. It’s an assumption of people here and hence now it’s so grown that I have to also put that as an arguement.
I agree on this one but you know what staying stagnant is a pretty bad move for most people. There’s a reason why there’s rise in MIT license and decline in GPL based licensing on most FOSS projects, so developers are free to change the model.
It’s FOSS licensing also the reason why most projects gets abandoned as once marketed as FOSS, they are unable to monetize this when it become popular.
But I wholeheartedly agree that branding something as FOSS and then not following FOSS practices is misleading. Unless they have MIT license, they are free to redistribute it further and with proper communication with users, it’s perfectly okay.
I have been using firefox from quite long but recently have switched to brave. I do know history of firefox and I can see what they are trying to do these days to stay alive.
I have read actual arguments, I might have not been able to make my point across more clearly. I think I wont be able to, it’s way to complicated to put in words as of now what I want to say, but I’m trying.
MIT is still FOSS and compatible with many other licenses incl. GPLv2 (particularly importantly with GNU/Linux) and GPLv3 . Just that it comes with no patent grants. Nothing sinister here.
FOSS licensing is what got those projects the popularity. Abandoning that after becoming popular is the project being greedy.
Yeah, this is contradicting what you said earlier. [1] Glad that now we’re all on the same page here.
Again, “Commerical FOSS” shouldn’t rely on FOSS for making money but marketing instead (which is equally valuable). As with all marketing, if you deviate away from your messages too often, folks will complain. There’s nothing that’s “not easy to understand” here, imo.
Personal opinion, I feel the most current successful (monetized) FOSS projects seem to revolve hosting the application or having features behind paywall. For example, next cloud, bitwarden, Ente auth, Wordpress, etc. It seems quite difficult to monetize a purely client side application.
If it’s client side only, then the only example I can think of is managing the complexity of it and support (Redhat for Linux).
I never said that MIT license has something sinister going on, I meant there is a rise in MIT based licenses in FOSS projects because this allows developers to easily take an existing project and then modify it freely to close source even if they wanted, which isn’t too easy with GPL license and this has everything to do with monetary purposes.
In Foss a developer doesn’t owes anything to anyone, it’s not being greedy.
The monetary discussion is different than following the FOSS practices.
True. I agree but as for “understanding” part, if everyone really understand how business works, there wouldn’t be this much outrage as you see these days with projects like BW or Firefox.
100% Agree and I can see more foss projects shifting to this business model, where the client is open source, but most work is done on the server which is closed source or not self hostable in some cases (if it’s open). I think overtime, this is how most projects will end up becoming in future. I could be wrong but this is how I feel.