A TV-presenter of a fairly popular TV-show with an audience in my country once told an anecdote that they wanted the admission for the audience to be free. But when the tickets were free, a lot less people showed up. When they changed the ticket to be the quite arbitrary amount of 7 EUR, suddenly the theater was full every time.

I’ve also done both, and I found both kinds of users in both situations. There have been cases on the commercial front where I just felt like giving customers their money back, even after years of having used the software, and told them to not come back. There’s a lot of entitlement and craziness from paying users too, and those are harder to ignore. With open-source it’s much simpler to drive a hard line.

My “favourites” are the ones threatening to abandon the tool, despite having never made a single positive contribution. On open-source that’s an easy laugh and a “good riddance”. On commercial cases it’s more frustrating and nuanced.

I disagree willingness to pay is that meaningful of a filter, in the cases I experienced. And it’s getting worse; many people are getting too impatient and act like everyone works for them specifically and only their needs matter.

I personally give away free software, and actually don't get bothered by comments as much. The catch? I write the software to fulfill my needs, and may or may not take anyone's suggestions at heart.

If they are so inclined, they can fork it and patch it. It's out there after all. As long as they obey the terms of the license I put forth, it's all fair.

There are more than 2 ways to do OSS vs proprietary. You can do OSS and refuse all commits or even any comments, e.g. https://codeberg.org/y20k/escapepod/src/branch/master/CONTRI...

Using GPL or MIT or whatever open or free license you prefer does not mean it's OK to get bullied.

It's perfectly fine to not accept entitlement and still let others use or even build on your work, if you want to.

You have the freedom to shape the interactions you want even if nobody else does it this way.

I've regularly heard something similar said of consulting work, too. Many people new to the game worry about charging too much, because if a client is paying more then surely the pressure will be higher. Instead they end up experiencing the opposite: charging a higher rate tends to get them a better kind of client.

I'm not sure what the exact lesson is here. Something about stingy people not being nice to work with, perhaps?

I like the idea of creating a OSS project, and then build extra on top of it for selling.

The OSS part ensured that even if I went full Sam Altman, the user will still have an absolute baseline they can fallback on. And given how lazy I am, the OSS is often basically 70% of the project. This also has the benefit that the significant part of the code can be audited for security/etc, sometimes even for free.

Agreed, which is why my stance on the matter at least on what I have control over, is either GPL/LGPL, or commercial license.

"Be entitled to whatever one is willing to give upstream" is my motto.

As someone who once had a popular open-source project. Opensource is just harder because you've to write code for <optics>. When I am working with a small team, I do not care if my commits are ugly or repetitive. Despite what people here say, all these things have very little to do with the reliability of actual code.

Same software i offer for free will take 2-5x more time if i did it opensource way.

I wanted to say "nonzero correlation with employability", but I've seen entitled GitHub issues from megacorporations too.

My experience is similar, but I remain more motivated to give away what I make than to ask people to pay for it.