bchavez
commented
6 years ago Hey Oliver,
I appreciate your concern. TBH, it's hard to say if the dual licensing really hurts adoption. I would say there is definitely another side to the story.
I was approached by a few people asking for new SSL features. These people would not have used this driver without SSL. They were willing to pay a small commercial license fee to 1) have SSL implemented and 2) use SSL features. Moreover, a commercial license gave them some assurance that the driver they were about to build their app on wasn't going to turn into a pile of unmaintained abandonware (like other unnamed driver projects).
It shouldn't feel like a bait and switch. Assuming you're using the NuGet package, I didn't remove any of your rights to continue using the driver as you were before the license change. I only added value to the driver by adding SSL features and licensed the API that enables SSL features inside the driver.
The cold, hard, dirty truth about open source is that it's hard. It's hard to maintain a high-quality open source project without some kind of economic model to support that effort. Take a quick survey of the landscape: RehtinkDB as a company shut down. The official drivers for RethinkDB are showing their age with unresolved issues piling up. There is hardly any human effort to maintain "official" drivers. Last Java driver release: Jan 2016.
Now, contrast this to the C# driver: IMHO, C# driver continues to be one of the best supported, well maintained, and fastest bugfix-to-release cycle drivers currently available for RethinkDB. Last C# driver release: 4 days ago.
Prior to the license change, after RethinkDB shut down, there were times when I felt like abandoning this project, but after the license change, the economics has kept me in the game.
For now, I feel keeping the dual license is the best approach moving forward to ensure our community continues receiving high-quality driver releases and fast response times.
Thanks, Brian
:ear_of_rice: :stew: "Out here in the fields... I fight for my meals... It's only teenage wasteland..."
I just noticed a change you made to license in April last year. I really think this hurts adoption. It's a bit of a bait & switch if you ask me.
While it's not an issue for me yet, it might cause me headaches in the future.
Please reconsider a switch back to standard Apache License.