Completely different situations. None of the MinIO team worked for free. MinIO is a COSS company (commercial open source software). They give a basic version of it away for free hoping that some people, usually at companies, will want to pay for the premium features. MinIO going closed source is a business decision and there is nothing wrong with that.

I highly recommend SeaweedFS. I used it in production for a long time before partnering with Wasabi. We still have SeaweedFS for a scorching hot, 1GiB/s colocated object storage, but Wasabi is our bread and butter object storage now.

There's nothing wrong at all with charging for your product. What I do take issue with, however, is convincing everyone that your product is FOSS, waiting until people undertake a lot of work to integrate your product into their infrastructure, and then doing a bait-and-switch.

Just be honest since the start that your product will eventually abandon its FOSS licence. Then people can make an informed decision. Or, if you haven't done that, do the right thing and continue to stand by what you originally promised.

> Working for free is not fun

Open source can be very fun if you genuinely enjoy it.

The problem is dealing with people that have wrong expectations, those need to be ignored.

If your main motivation creating/maintaince a popular open source project was to make money then you don't really undersand the open source ethos.

I don’t feel that way at all. I’ve been maintaining open source storage systems for few years. I love it. Absolutely love it. I maintain TidesDB it’s a storage engine. I also have back pain but that doesn’t mean you can’t do what you love.

Thanks, you finally settled my dilemma of whether I should have a free version of UXWizz...

> Ultimately, dealing with people who don't pay for your product is not fun.

I find it the other way around. I feel a bit embarrassed and stressed out working with people who have paid for a copy of software I've made (which admittedly is rather rare). When they haven't paid, every exchange is about what's best for humanity and the public in general, i.e. they're not supposed to get some special treatment at the expense of anyone else, and nobody has a right to lord over the other party.

Ex mailcow owner here. Can confirm. Hard times.

I loved everyone in the community though. By heart. You were the best.

Maybe open source developers should stop imagining the things they choose to give away for free as "products". I maintain a small open source library. It doesn't make any money, it will never make any money, people are free to use or not as they choose. If someone doesn't like the way I maintain the repository they are free to fork it.

It's remarkable how many people wrongly assume that open source projects can't be monetized. Business models and open source are orthogonal but compatible concepts. However, if your primary goal while maintaining an open source project is profiting financially from it, your incentives are skewed. If you feel this way, you should also stop using any open source projects, unless you financially support them as well.

Good luck with the back pain.

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