by Joel_Mckay | 2025-08-06 02:12:22+00:00
In general, being a point of contact for a small community project means you sometimes get weirdos showing up to your door IRL, or various other scams and abuse.

In terms of software we usually used Apache 2.0, LGPL, and GPL licenses.

Anecdotes:

1. FOSS e-Commerce tax module for merchant account gateway was resold as commercial software to several local businesses by a "startup". Didn't care until years later when we started getting spammed with support requests given the original email was in the source, and the "startup" had moved on to other ventures.

2. Wrote industrial drivers for integrated manufactured equipment, and due to remote locations it was important service people could modify/rebuild the open code as needed. We tracked prototype product GPS telemetry to a Singapore University campus, and saw a copy of the GUI at a trade show the following year. No more FOSS in commercial releases.

3. Built generic 3D printing hardware for our local club activities, and within a few months it was a product on Aliexpress. The problem was it was the Beta firmware design, and again people that paid for something that was supposed to be free get irate about support.

4. Built a small OS distro for Ham radio, EE, ROS, CNC, and 3D printing. Of the 8000 users only 2 people provided any sort of participation in maintaining the build. Also, many people were paranoid there was some sort of nefarious purpose even when meeting them in real life. “Free as in free beer” tends to make people suspicious in real life.

5. Tried to expand existing FOSS software, but get ghosted by the community when trying to learn about their code (stare into the void of ambiguous documentation.) Most FOSS communities are great, but some people just don't want to know about you or your silly problems. Better off with your own project fork version specific to a use-case, and share under a similar hands-off library support model.

6. Built custom FOSS IT infrastructure, and had publishers switch licenses years later. Makes people look like fools when a certain now well known vendor cold-call solicits a $8k support fee for something they probably broke on purpose 2-weeks prior. Re-wrote it in 3 weeks, and never exposed core systems to a “trust me bro” crowd again.

7. Took a few foundation courses to clear up the WTF deprecated vestigial garbage moments in the kernel source. Realized the value proposition is just not worth the perpetual Beta and political hassles. Started writing my own toy kernel that is just as odd as the hardware it is meant to run on, as traditional architecture problems just do not handle parallelism cleanly. Don’t ask, seriously… lol

8. Tried financial & bug support for other small FOSS projects we think are cool, but around 60% of the time projects are abandoned/EOL within 2 years. Building a user base around that is impossible.

I am sure there are some folks that fair much better, but in general most FOSS problems I saw are economic and or political… from a technical perspective Open source has proven more reliable than most commercial options.

Thus, prefer FOSS projects that serve your specific needs first, write something that fits your own use-case if you must, and expect zero community support unless your team lucks out. YMMV =3