[john_fushi]

I guess Matsumoto should have charged for Ruby. I'm sure Mike Perham and Derek Kraan would have been glad to pay for that and that the Ruby community would be in a strong and healthy shape.

[ianbutler]

People need to eat man, doing something for free is a luxury not many possess. We can see how messed up the financial situation is for a lot of Open Source devs and their lives would be better if they were charging money instead of subsisting off grants and donations.

I don't even necessarily disagree with your point that without being free those things wouldn't have taken off but we need to find a way to strike a balance in the developer community.

Sidekiq having a free version and an enterprise version walks an okay middle line imo.

[wyldberry]

I personally try to spend money or use ad supported anything that is open-source just to help someone else eat. It really hit home for me about five years ago when the author of a WoW addon[0] couldn't develop anymore because of his financial and life situation.

So many communities across the web rely on people putting in their spare hours for free just to enjoy things. Whether it's spreadsheets in Eve, Addons and Weak Auras in WoW, forum analysis posts, or whatever goes on in the depths of pvpoke, so much free labor underpins massive parts of the world today.

I would love something that I could donate x money to per month and then based on usage, have it dole out to all the content providers with perhaps a minimum per month. It just seems daunting to do that as a) not a crypto scheme and b.) across all the various creator landscapes.

[0]https://www.polygon.com/2018/9/25/17901552/world-of-warcraft...

[jorge-d]

Well Sidekiq is free to use. It's only the pro version that he charges and the free version code is open source.

I don't see the problem in having that kind of business model, it still allows the community to thrive and offers entreprises a way to have premium support.

Plus it allows him to invest more time in maintaining the free version.

[phamilton]

I have no problem paying for the Pro version, but one if its marketing pitches is "enhanced reliability", which is a wild marketing spin on "the free version will lose jobs in fairly common scenarios".

In sidekiq without super_fetch (a paid feature), any jobs in progress when a worker crashes are lost forever. If a worker merely encounters an exception the job will be put back on the queue and retried but a crash means the job is lost.

Again, no problem paying for Pro, but I would prefer a little more transparency on how big a gap that is.

[ch4s3]

This is a very bad take. From an OSS perspective languages can attract large communities of contributors and corporate sponsors because of their broad appeal and utility. Specialized libraries will have more trouble doing both and may need alternate models to sustain themselves. From a business perspective, Mike offers not only a free version but the paid enterprise version comes with support from Mike and his team, which is something you can't get from a language owner unless you outright hire them or they run a consultancy.

[the_gastropod]

To be fair to Mike, Sidekiq is absolutely free. He sells an enterprise version for money, that comes with support.

[1123581321]

And he only started because companies were telling him it would be easier if they could just pay him.

[mattgreenrocks]

Hilarious take given the fact that there are plenty of orgs making an order of magnitude more than Mike is that rely on Ruby.

[bdcravens]

Not by Matz, but there are paid versions of Ruby out there.