“Open source” does not mean “includes free support” (2020)

https://raccoon.onyxbits.de/blog/bugreport-free-support/

by jeroenhd • 4 years ago

171 99 4 years ago

raccoon.onyxbits.de

followup: https://raccoon.onyxbits.de/blog/reactions-bugreport-free-su...

Jiro3• 4 years ago

He has no obligation to do anything about bugs, but open source projects whose developers listen to bug reports is so common that if he doesn't, he should explicitly say "I don't take bug reports" in a reasonably obvious place, out of common courtesy. Failing to do so is the equivalent of having a deliberately misleading user interface.

chiefalchemist• 4 years ago

Yes and no.

The issue seems to be, these aren't true bug reports but support tickets pretending to be otherwise. The creator also mentions docs. If people try to save time (i.e., time is money) and don't read the docs but they want support. Well, there should be a fee for that. As we all know, ultimately, nothing is free.

massysett• 4 years ago

This attitude is why I don’t share much software anymore, even if I spent a lot of time developing it and someone else might find it useful. All it takes is someone claiming I’m being “deliberately misleading” (even though the license explicitly says “this software is provided as is without warranty of any kind, express or implied”) and for that someone to hire a lawyer. At that point I’ve lost. It doesn’t matter that the claim is baseless.

This only saddens me a bit because there are so many people out there sharing software that nowadays my meager contributions won’t be missed. However I do wonder how much truly useful software does not get shared due to these liability concerns. A corporation has to weigh the goodwill they get from sharing software versus the potential ire of angry self-entitled people who think they are entitled to free support and extra disclaimers beyond those in the license. Why bother?

scarygliders2• 4 years ago

he should explicitly say "I don't take bug reports" in a reasonably obvious place, out of common courtesy.

He did. In two very good and explanatory blog posts. The software license also states that there is no warranty implied etc. etc.

If that's not enough information then I don't know what is.

sundarurfriend• 4 years ago

I'm completely in support of what they're saying (and wish more open source devs adopted it).

However, the tone of the article somehow went gradually from "straightforward and honest" to "actually toxic" towards the end, and left me somewhat disinclined to choose any of this author's products.

heurisko• 4 years ago

Considering the number of open source developers who get burned out, I'm ok with the tone.

Far better someone protects themselves while providing something of benefit, than someone getting dragged under by expectations of free work.

rs999gti3• 4 years ago

The site will not load, you guys hugged it to death.

Do any of you have an archive link?

jeroenhd3• 4 years ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20220128222933/https://raccoon.on...

jsmith99• 4 years ago

Unfortunately this sounds like a bug report. If you could read the post you would discover the maintainer has no interest in such information from non customers.

protontypes• 4 years ago

In fact, open source means free support, in the sense that independent and libre support can form around such a product. This may not be free of charge, if that is what is meant.

mumblemumble2• 4 years ago

Open source doesn't "mean" that, per se; that's just the default way things work.

Source: I used to make a living offering independent support for commercial software that someone else made and sold.

phoe-krk• 4 years ago

open source means free support, in the sense that independent and libre support can form around such a product.

"Means" and "can" are incompatible. Either free software may mean free support, or independent and libre support always forms around free software projects.

yjftsjthsd-h• 4 years ago

"unbundled" support, perhaps?

tehjoker• 4 years ago

It happens, but outside of the really big projects, it usually seems like there's one or two people doing all the maintenance. The more technical the project (e.g. algorithms, image codecs) the worse the problem is.

I was fortunate enough once that a big company used an algo I wrote and contributed a performance improvement in an area I'd had writers block on, but that was the exception.

jqpabc1232• 4 years ago

Bottom line: User beware --- you get what you pay for.

Pay now or pay later. If you can't support it yourself or hire/pay someone to support it, it's basically unsupported and probably should not be used for any critical function.

From a business perspective, it's sort of unintentional malware. It invades your systems and is just waiting for the right set of circumstances to bring them crashing down --- with the developer denying all responsibility.

sokoloff• 4 years ago

Users most commonly get a lot more than they pay for. It may not be everything, but it’s pretty clear that it’s more than they pay for, on average.

JonChesterfield• 4 years ago

If you can't write it or pay for it, and it's providing a critical function, you only have a business because someone gave their product away for free.

jqpabc1232• 4 years ago

Not necessarily true.

Example: Developer incorporates open source that they don't understand and didn't write because "everyone does it".

Their employer may not discover all this until there is a problem.

pjmlp• 4 years ago

Which is fair, other professionals have to pay for their tools.

jotm3• 4 years ago

Modern software is more like "pay always", so for personal (and often even professional) use I'd rather go with free and self-maintained.

Hell, everything I buy, used or new, I also maintain by myself, I can count the times I used warranty on one hand. Not the typical user, I know.

teddyh2• 4 years ago

The headline is obviously true; nobody should expect unlimited free support from any free software maintainer. But the author goes a step further, and refuses to even look at or read a bug report, unless they’re paid to do so. This is certainly their prerogative, but it is a bit more extreme than what is the current norm. They also do not want to provide a user forum for users to help each other, which is also the author’s prerogative, but it works against the author’s putative goal of being bothered less about problems with the software.

Being this far from the normal software maintainer behavior is of course permitted, but common courtesy demands that these deviations be clearly specified to users. There should be a “I DO NOT ACCEPT, READ OR LOOK AT ANY BUG REPORTS UNLESS YOU PAY ME” warning label on the project page.

franciscop2• 4 years ago

It literally says it there, in big capital letters in the Apache used on the Racoon software:

software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.

Or the very common MIT license:

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED

Is that not enough? Developers providing support is a nice touch on top of what the license says, and I'd argue that even if it's normalized it should not be assumed, and we should do a better job to make sure that users of open source software know that any support provided is indeed an extra, super nice plus, not something to expect/demand.

ChrisMarshallNY6• 4 years ago

As someone that ran a fairly intense open-source infrastructure for a decade (before it was taken off my hands, and is now a community effort), I can say that I don't mind bug reports, and I may choose to fix them, but being a whiny little snot gets you nothing from me.

Also -and this is my fave-, people reporting "features I want" as bugs; followed by increasingly shrill demands that I "fix" their "bug."

teddyh2• 4 years ago

Warranty is something other than support. And regardless of what the license text says, this is not usual behavior, and users deserve adequate notice of it.

voakbasda• 4 years ago

One problem that I see is that conventionally developers will at least look over reports, so this goes against cultural norms. If you don’t know you need to pay, you might expect some initial feedback. Personally, I wouldn’t, as I think most projects absolutely suck at providing support.

I also have to wonder how badly this affects his sales funnel? Seems like a good way to make potential clients look for another project or developer to work with. This kind of attitude would be an instant turn off for me.

SpicyLemonZest• 4 years ago

It seems to me that the only way we can do a better job is by encouraging developers who choose not to offer support to make that explicit. Establishing a norm among the small set of people who read abstract discussions on open source principles isn't going to accomplish much.

jotm3• 4 years ago

No one reads those ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

grahamlee• 4 years ago

Before Sun Microsystems got very into GPLing their entire estate, Scott McNealy had a phrase that free software was “free as in puppies” in that you might get them for free but you’re paying every day after. Our author here doubles down on free as in puppies.

mumblemumble2• 4 years ago

This is absolutely my experience. For example, you'd think that the message passing space is completely owned by FOSS at this point. But, a while back, I worked at a shop that used a commercial library for building APIs, and I was genuinely impressed at how nice it was to work with. It would be difficult or impossible to do a proper analysis on this point, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if that package paid for itself many times over in annual labor cost savings.

wallscratch• 4 years ago

Do you remember what library it was?

jotm3• 4 years ago

Much better than buying puppies and then paying every day after :D

phendrenad23• 4 years ago

Sounds similar to "free as in piano" https://twitter.com/leahvelleman/status/1377829865504833536?...

humanrebar3• 4 years ago

It's more like free as in a car. Puppies don't generally provide significant utility as such, even though dogs are adorable, have great intangible benefits, etc.

A car requires maintenance, upkeep, fuel, insurance, certification (a license), registration, and other things. But a free car has a lot of value assuming it works. Even then, some people can't afford even a free car.

accountofme• 4 years ago

I'm sorry to say this but you are uninformed. Dogs have immense utility! These days yes they are generally house pets but they greatly improve mental health and love you unconditionally.

Dogs are also used as ratters, herders, and as protection for livestock from predators like foxes or lions (depending on where you live...). So much so, some working dogs can go for 50k in Australia!

Dogs require upkeep in the form of food, water, vaccinations, training and toileting.

As such the description "free as in puppies" is apt.

Have a good day :)

michaelmrose• 4 years ago

The problem with the analogy is that with paid software you are also in the same position of paying to feed the puppies but you also paid up front for the puppies and signed a contract to buy the food from the seller.

stjohnswarts• 4 years ago

Yeah but if you pay for puppies you also have to pay for puppies forever after that? So isn't that the same thing, except you saved a bit at the start?

rs999gti3• 4 years ago

Free for individuals, but not free for companies should be the motto of Open Source.

I've been on tons of sales calls and architecture calls with companies and they always exclaim "Open Source" like it is a feature or selling point.

Nope, unless your company if contributing back with money or time, you should not use Open Source.

rileymat2• 4 years ago

Why? As a customer it is nice to know that if the company goes under you could maintain and use it going forward.

phillipcarter• 4 years ago

Yeah, OSS is fantastic for business precisely because you're not dependent on a vendor to solve a problem you're having.

phendrenad23• 4 years ago

Companies that go under don't take their products down with them though, that's a common misunderstanding. If there are paying customers, someone will buy the company's assets and support contracts.

jeroenhd3• 4 years ago

The ability for you or another company to fork and continue a product can be sold to other businesses. Even some closed source companies do this through source code escrow; if the company goes bankrupt, customers get the source code. For proprietary software, this involves a significant fee, of course, but when a product is essential for business continuity, such a system can be considered crucial. Products like SaaS company back offices are given the escrow treatment, for example.

bobthechef• 4 years ago

Are you claiming companies cannot use open source software unless they contribute? If so, that's preposterous. If the author of the product has released it under a license that doesn't make that stipulation, then where does this strange constraint come from?

Don't moralize. If you want something, put it in the license.

rs999gti3• 4 years ago

Are you claiming companies cannot use open source software unless they contribute?

No they can use, but the moment they want a change or patch, please pay up.

throwawayboise• 4 years ago

"Free for noncommercial use" is a legitimate point of view and you can license your software that way if you want, but other projects chose "free to do whatever you want" and that's just as legitimate.

that_guy_iain2• 4 years ago

There is Ployform Project[1] that provides licenses that include free for noncommercial use. I'm currently having a custom license created so I can release my project for free for non-commercial and commercial orgs with under than $50,000 a year revenue. I want to only charge companies that can afford to pay and help people get off the ground.

[1] https://polyformproject.org/

freedomben• 4 years ago

You're presenting a false dichotomy. There are plenty of open source products that also have paid support options. That's becoming quite the norm in fact.

But even still, I've had to use plenty of paid/closed source proprietary solutions that sucked up a ton of our time. At one point the company was paying more than $10,000 per month for IBM Rational Clear Case and it was a hunk of shit that routinely lost source code. We had to hire a small team just to "administer" it (aka try to help us work around bugs and become experts in the CLI options and recovery logs so they could help others).

There are "open source" options that are half baked and buggy, but there are plenty more that are great polished products. The goodness of software is often not dependent on source availability.

Any software you adopt has a risk of requiring work/effort to use. At least with open source you have options.

I strongly advocate for open source in the company. I only consider proprietary when there isn't a suitable open source option.

jrm4• 4 years ago

Kills me how obvious this should be. It's free as in "library." You may go to the library and learn all you want. Check out them books and do all the projects in them. That's it.

rincewind2• 4 years ago

There is a difference between free software and open source, and this may be the former, but is not the latter

b3morales• 4 years ago

Can you elaborate? The source for the software under discussion is published openly, with an Apache 2.0 license; this is an OSI-approved license.

rincewind2• 4 years ago

Open source is the "development model", free software is the license. I thought this was common knowledge.

jeroenhd3• 4 years ago

Hug of death, archive link here: http://web.archive.org/web/20210502014855/https://raccoon.on...

mark-r• 4 years ago

Obviously that paid support is not paying enough for a beefy server.

ChrisMarshallNY6• 4 years ago

And I enjoyed his follow-up: https://web.archive.org/web/20210411193438/https://raccoon.o...

paulywog• 4 years ago

I've always liked the saying, "It's open source. If you break it, you get to keep both pieces!"

Arnt• 4 years ago

"This is… you get to keep booth pieces" was the actual license text of something I ported to linux late in 1992 or early in 1993. (The middle bit was something about free software, I think.) Can't remember what software that was though.

AshamedCaptain• 4 years ago

Open source does not mean "includes free support"; what it means is that you are free to look for support elsewhere.

65102• 4 years ago

It would be fun if this could be fixed. Create a protocol for free support.

1) Developers should be presented with a refined list of support requests relevant to development in a format that they can act upon.

2) It should be made convenient for users to interact and discuss the software. If numbers are not sufficient to build a community the chat channel can be bundled with that of similar software.

3) The discussion should produce wiki format q&a, draft-bug reports and feature requests that may start out as copy past chat logs.

etc? ideas?

verve_rat• 4 years ago

Sounds like you want a product owner, or maybe a BA?

Is the "problem" with open source that it is mostly, only developers working on software?

65102• 4 years ago

It seems by definition only developers should be working on the software? Financially motivated efforts have many useful occupations that don't work on the software but bring competitive advantage.

Imagine someone who designs cars. He could answer questions from those learning how to drive but it would be pretty uninteresting. He would have to do a lot of it until something related to design would come along.

Users driving the application can learn interesting things from the discussion about it and may enjoy selfless acts of helping others. We know how to do forums, wiki and IRC if the community is willing and big enough. Smaller projects sometimes have barely populated mostly silent IRC channels. It should, at least in theory, be possible to combine those categorically.

Developers can already set all of these up but doing the whole list and maintaining it takes a lot of effort and it is a waste of time if there are 3 and a half users.

There is plenty of low hanging fruit. If there are enough low effort participants someone will properly fill the bug if the issue is worthy.

It is also motivating to be able to see users when a developer doubts the value of his effort.

Who knows, perhaps there are big ideas to be had?

seanhunter• 4 years ago

The counterpoint to this is that paid-for software often does not include any sort of support that's worth having.

Jeaye• 4 years ago

Reminds me of Rich Hickey's article, along similar lines (Open source is not about you): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18538123

phendrenad23• 4 years ago

The problem is, many open-source maintainers DO provide free support, so people come to expect it. Some even get confused and angry when they meet a maintainer who does not.

dsr_• 4 years ago

There are an infinite number of projects on the Internet. There are an infinite number of open source projects on the Net. No developer owes anyone else anything that they have not promised. So: this developer does not want to see bug reports or support requests from anyone who has not paid him. That's fine.

Open source means that you have options. The options include paying the developer, starting your own support community with other users, paying some other developer to work on it, starting your own fork... and complaining on the Net. Any or all of those are available to everyone, all the time.

Thanks for putting your software out on the Net with an open source license. It makes the whole world a little better.

TheRealNGenius• 4 years ago

I wouldn't say infinite, there are definitely finitely many

lamontcg• 4 years ago

I'd really like the ability to lock down issues and pull requests to only trusted collaborators to avoid support requests and all the low information bug reports, complaints and showerthoughts about features that would take 1,000s of hours to fulfill.

oxplot• 4 years ago

Here’s a paraphrased conversation I’m having way to often, costing me way too much time, keeping me from doing things that are way more important.

Then don't have it! Set things up such that only after someone pays, you get notified.

omaranto• 4 years ago

I can understand not promising to fix bugs (in fact, I'd say that's the default), but not wanting to even find out about them seems very strange. It must be someone who doesn't like their own software.

newbalance• 4 years ago

Refreshing! We need more developers with this mindset in the open source space. Users have become entirely unreasonable about their expectations.

sally1620• 4 years ago

I thought the phrase "COMES WITH ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY" in most open-source licenses would make it clear. But obviously no one reads licenses or EULAs.

However, I would let people file issues and would just let them sit there if they are not a paying for it. This way at least the known issues are documented and there would be less duplication.

Letting people fix their own problems is a good strategy. However, if you are encouraging people to send PRs, then there is a maintenance problem. Especially if some eager people decide to add major feature or refactor the code.

ajnin• 4 years ago

I'll have a bit of a contrarian opinion here: if you publish some software there is at least an implied notion that it allows to solve some problem (license terms notwithstanding). For example if you go to the home page for this blog then you will find a rather well made page that might get you the impression that you can find here some piece of software that allows to download APKs. Now, if it actually does not quite work because of bugs that you refuse to even list somewhere because that would be "work", then you take the responsibility to mislead people and make them lose their time based on incomplete information. Yes your time is important, but other people's too. When you unleash something upon the world, then you have some responsibility for it, at least morally. For context I do have some minor open source projects that very few people use and I allow bug reports but I just ignore them until I have the time and motivation to get back to it in an hypothetical future. In the meantime it serves as information for others.

JodieBenitez• 4 years ago

Thousands of companies release open source stuff in the hope of selling support for it. It's a commercial bait, a perfectly fine strategy. The author does nothing more, why should we expect anything more ?

hakre• 4 years ago

Well, many thousands of workers write and maintain software and eventually its release is under free software, getting paid by the hour.

It's just working, why should we expect anything more? A worker can't do anything more and there is not even a commercial bait for her.

kragen• 4 years ago

https://raccoon.onyxbits.de/blog/reactions-bugreport-free-su... was his followup. His software must be awfully solid if he never learns about real, important bugs from random non-paying users.

otikik• 4 years ago

Just writing to express my support for this person’s approach to open source, and his views.

Mine is only dedicating 1 day every 5 years to support. It scales well.

jitendrac2• 4 years ago

I had similar experience in past. I submitted a bug report in a small library, the author/owner just rudely talked about that I should not expect him to work for free, and closed the bug. I would have been happy if it was tagged as non priority bug and did not get resolved in near future, but the already existing open bug report accepts the validity of bug and is an invitation for any willingful contributor.

I believe submitting a bugreport itself is a contribution. I know it does not mean that the developer is liable for fixing it or improving it, but if it's a valid bug at least they should politely refuse to fix or even just ignore it and let it be open.

vgel• 4 years ago

The author responded to a similar argument in a follow-up post:

Your bug doesn’t bother me (or my paying users). If it did, I’d have fixed it myself. When submitting a bug report, you are not working for me, you are working for yourself and the user community. The same way I was, when making the original software available free of charge (whether or not you want to do it is entirely your choice, I’m not asking you to). Does your bug report include a patch? If yes, then the problem’s solved for you, if not, then you are expecting me to come up with a fix. That’s a work order, here’s my bill.

------

I'm personally in the middle; if the bug is posted on an open bug tracker, it can be a good way to coordinate the community to find workarounds and get a patch started. Also triaging a bug is work, so it could be considered helpful to say "I've tracked the cause down to this module/function/line" even without a patch.

OTOH, a Github issues is also a great gathering place for entitled jerks. and many an issue thread has become the HN/Reddit/4Chan punching bag of the day and now the project maintainer is expected to both write a patch for free and moderate / lock and clean up an impromptu internet complaining situation, so IDK. Open source is a mess sometimes.

jitendrac2• 4 years ago

Yes, I agree sometimes Open Source is a mess. I also accept that I always use Open Source projects and rarely contribute. But I do file bug when I feel it is appropriate. If ever I see a person struggling with something(on reddit,forums,hn or even quora) and asking genuine/silly question, I will help them up to my knowledge, it can be small tweaking, small steps by step instruction, introducing them to how it works(you may call it mini on-boarding checklist) or even an implementation suggestion of feature if the person is a developer. I do consider it a community contribution.

Accepting/Ignoring a valid bug is just not too much of task, rather it is more work to file the reply as what you got. Just accept/ignore the bug report and forget, don't be rude.

mbrodersen• 4 years ago

Excellent read. I agree 100%. I wish all Open Source projects operated this way. It would dramatically improve the number of Open Source developers who could make a living doing it, and massively reduce the burnouts and depressions.

“Open source” does not mean “includes free support” (2020)

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