[Ensorceled]

> > Working for free is not fun. Having a paid offering with a free community version is not fun. Ultimately, dealing with people who don't pay for your product is not fun.

> Completely different situations. None of the MinIO team worked for free. MinIO is a COSS company (commercial open source software).

MinIO is dealing with two out of the three issues, and the company is partially providing work for free, how is that "completely different"?

[mbreese]

The MinIO business model was a freemium model (well, Open Source + commercial support, which is slightly different). They used the free OSS version to drive demand for the commercially licensed version. It’s not like they had a free community version with users they needed to support thrust upon them — this was their plan. They weren’t volunteers.

You could argue that they got to the point where the benefit wasn’t worth the cost, but this was their business model. They would not have gotten to the point where the could have a commercial-only operation without the adoption and demand generated from the OSS version.

Running a successful OSS project is often a thankless job. Thanks for doing it. But this isn’t that.

[Ensorceled]

> Running a successful OSS project is often a thankless job. Thanks for doing it. But this isn’t that.

No, even if you are being paid, it's a thankless, painful job to deal with demanding, entitled free users. It's worse if you are not being paid, but I'm not sure why you are asserting dealing with bullshit is just peachy if you are being paid.

[throwaway894345]

“I don’t want to support free users” is completely different than “we’re going all-in on AI, so we’re killing our previous product for both open source and commercial users and replacing it with a new one”