Open Source Maintenance Fee v1.1

tl;dr

The OSMF EULA now uses a minimum annual revenue threshold of US$10,000 to exempt those people and organizations from the Maintenance Fee.

OSMF v1.0

When I designed the Open Source Maintenance Fee, my goal was to find a price that no one would argue with but could represent real financial benefit to maintainers of successful Open Source projects. I was already exploring the idea during the xz/liblzma attack without knowing where it was going at the time:

200 companies paying a $500/year to a project with a single maintainer is $100,000 salary for the maintainer.

Slide those numbers around based on the importance of the project and I think there are very reasonable futures.

100x$50 = $5000

500x$100=$50,000

etc.

• Rob Mensching 12:37 PM - Mar 30, 2024

In the end I settled on $10/mo. It was an easy round number. And it was small enough that no one really complained that the work maintainers do was worth less than that.

Well, no one but the people that made even less than $10/mo.

The problem

The problem I did not foresee were fledgling businesses. The sort of businesses that are making less than $500/mo. They pull in more than $0/yr but were still trying to find their way. These businesses could be using a dozen or more Open Source projects directly and, in some cases, could end up paying more in Open Source Maintenance Fees than they made in MRR.

It was never the intent to bankrupt people with the OSMF.

So, even though I could explain the intent, the terms of the EULA were clear. I knew I was going to need to modify the OSMF EULA.

OSMF v1.1

The OSMF EULA already exempted people who do not make revenue from paying the Maintenance Fee. I just needed to expand the exemption for “low revenue” users in a way that still met the Open Source Maintenance Fee’s goals:

• Simple - one of the superpowers of the OSMF is that it is easy to explain: if you make money using an Open Source project then you pay a small maintenance fee.
• Sensible - the exemption needs to be reasonable for both those being exempted and those that are not.
• Sustainable - maintainers need to be compensated for the effort they put into the project.

After doing a survey of projects and people, I calculated that a simple exemption of somewhere between $5,000 to $10,000 per year would work out. In the end, I went with the high end of that range and move the minimum annual revenue threshold to $10,000.

And since this was a relaxing of the EULA terms, I figured I could publish it as a dot-release: OSMF v1.1

WiX v7

The OSMF v1.1 release timing was tight for WiX v7 which is scheduled to release it’s -rc.1 the same week. But I think the change addresses key feedback and, as I noted above, it relaxes the EULA so I expect no concerns about updating the terms for the next major version of WiX.

There’s more feedback I want to talk about but that’s for another time. Until then, keep coding. You know I am.