Finbuckle.MultiTenant Long-term Project Sustainability

[AndrewTriesToCode]

Hello,
With all the recent discussion around popular .NET open source projects commercializing and moving away from open source, I wanted to address a few things regarding Finbuckle.MultiTenant. While it's not nearly as popular as those projects, one thing I've seen mentioned repeatedly is that they should have been more upfront that they might go in such a direction one day.

So here it is: please be advised that one day I may seek to commercialize Finbuckle.MultiTenant. I have no specific plans as of now, and I think there will always be a free option. The project is a lot of work and I currently have 6 sponsors totaling $30/month (and one of them is myself for testing purposes). It is not at the level of support needed ensure long-term sustainability.

One thing I'm looking at is https://opensourcemaintenancefee.org which advocates for a maintenance fee for commercial entities using the binaries distributed via NuGet.org.

In the meantime, you can support the project by starring or sponsoring on GitHub.

Thanks you all! I'd love to hear your feedback below.

[AndrewTriesToCode]

@SheaRogers
@dimesoftware
@avousv
@tomstylestailwind
@markgould

Hi all, GitHub makes it hard to communicate directly, I want to say a big THANK YOU for your support for this project as sponsors and collaborators.

Please do not hesitate to send me any feedback or thoughts. Thanks again!

[vigouredelaruse]

howdy; i think it's easy to see how in general a single developer oss effort is unsustainable for the simple fact that priorities change for one person, less so for a group or organization

for your consideration: automapper is another very useful tool with lots of features. they recently shifted their license scheme in a way that does not break for experimenters and gives enterprise users the opportunity to pay for delegating maintenance to the oss community

best regards

[robmen]

Here's my two cents that you didn't ask for, so feel free to disregard: 😜

IMHO, one of the most significant problems with each of the projects that "went commercial" recently is that they abandoned their Open Source roots. That act betrays a key piece of their identity, and people don't react well to such betrayals. ¹

The Open Source Maintenance Fee is a unique sustainability solution because it enables a project to keep its Open Source license. The lack of betrayal allows us to focus on the fact that maintaining an Open Source project takes effort. That has proven very effective. I've found that 99% of the conversation is about how to pay the fee, not whether to pay it.

Footnotes

1. Note, I do think many who complain only used a project because it was free (and useful, but also because it was free). They use this sense of betrayal to hide their frustration at having to pay for a project that brought them value. ↩

[AndrewTriesToCode]

@robmen I appreciate the input. How's the Open Source Maintenance Fee going so far? Any other projects of similar size using it?

[robmen]

The OSMF is working extremely well in the @wixtoolset. There are a couple of "bugs" that are just fixed or are in the process of being fixed. Namely:

1. Invoices via GitHub required a $5k minimum. That doesn't work well when a company's fee is only $720/yr. GitHub is fixing this for the OSMF. Yay!

2. I assumed (we know how that's going to work out) that dotnet.exe install and add package commands would respect the requireLicenseAcceptance bit the way VS does. They do not so it is very easy for consumers to not notice the EULA update in WiX v6. We have a design proposal to solve this problem for WiX v7.

So, at this time, I recommend projects wait to adopt the OSMF until the first issue above is resolved. Some procurement teams have raised reasonable objections about the $5k minimum and while I know how to navigate procurement team pushback, I don't expect most maintainers will want to deal with it.

But, very very soon, I believe we will have resolutions for all the open issues and documentation to guide consumers and maintainers. Once resolved, I will finally feel ready to recommend the OSMF to any interested project.

Finally, there is one other project that has adopted the OSMF (that I know of): @kzu's devlooped org. That was fairly recent so I don't know how adoption is going for him. I've also talked to many maintainers, who will consider the OSMF when I get all the bugs fixed. :)

[AndrewTriesToCode]

That is very interesting, thanks. I am seriously considering it. Is the .NET Foundation weighing in at all?

[robmen]

I've presented the OSMF to the .NET Foundation a couple of times. Everyone was very supportive and more than a little bit intrigued. The new .NET Foundation's President recently mentioned he is personally going to sponsor his usage of OSS as if an OSMF were required everywhere (that's what we do at FireGiant as well).

One of the key benefits of the OSMF is that it DOES NOT change the project's Open Source license. These other projects that "commercialized" could not remain in the .NET Foundation because they were no longer Open Source (a pre-req to being a part of the .NET Foundation).

[AndrewTriesToCode]

@robmen great job on the recent .NET Rocks podcast. I'm likely going to go with OSMF in November and am starting to put together the messaging. One thing I was thinking about was having a build target for Release and Publish builds that require a AcceptOsmfEula property to be defined as true and to print a friendly message otherwise directing to a url with more details. Seems like a good balance of nudging and non-intrusiveness. Are there any other interesting approaches you've come across?

[robmen]

Yes, I can recommend exactly that. I wrote about this recently in my Eduforcement blog post. I'd highly recommend "borrowing" the WiX implementation. For NuGet-only projects, a simple Target is all you need (see change ).

[AndrewTriesToCode]

I posted #1195 to announce adopting the OSMF effective 11/10/26 with the expected .NET 11 and Finbuckle MultiTenant 11 releases.

[AndrewTriesToCode]

@robmen do you think there is any potential for a OSMF nuget host that allows authentication via GitHub to confirm sponsorship? Either a semi "official" one, or one that individual projects can spin up and host e.g. via Docker? In such a case I would probably not even host releases on nuget.org or maybe only the initial release for each major version but all updates are on the OSMF feed.

[robmen]

Yes, quite possible. Right now, I'm focused on smoothing the procurement process.

[kzu]

If you can bear the "contaminated" idea, I did precisely that at https://github.com/devlooped/SponsorLink/. Users would run a dotnet global tool sponsor sync and get a JWT signed manifest from the backend with their sponsorship claims (first run would require they install/authenticate with the corresponding GH App). Docs at https://www.devlooped.com/SponsorLink/