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Open source maintenance fee (opensourcemaintenancefee.org)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I saw this some time ago and wasn't really sure how to feel about it. On one hand it's good to make corporations compensate maintainers, but I also don't want to be forced to ask for a fee because my project uses another project that uses this.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago

Fuck this project, but… their source code can be free and open source even if they distribute binaries which aren’t.

An example of how this didn't work for one project. (From memory, and it was a long time ago - 2005/2008 ish)

Xchat was once the best IRC client for Windows (after Mirc). It was free software, but the developer started charging for the Windows builds of it. Linux binaries were still free, but he claimed that it was time consuming to build on Windows and etc etc (A bit rich considering it was mostly his code - and there were suspicions he made it deliberately so)

Some people were pretty pissed off about this, especially as it used some other code that was foss and it was felt against the spirit.

Anyway, it was cloned into Hexchat which is fully free on all platforms and apparently not so difficult to build binaries after all.

15 years later to today, Hexchat is thriving and Xchat has been completely dead for 15 years.