Another open source dev stops support because corporates won't pay
Christofer Dutz is the latest in a series of developers to down tools in protest at corporates' free use of their work
Christofer Dutz, the creator and lead developer of the free Apache PLC4X industrial automation library suite, has announced his intent to stop providing free community support for the PLC4X software if corporate users do not start paying.
"Working on Apache PLC4X is a huge amount of work and it's expensive, as it requires purchasing expensive hard- and software," Dutz wrote in a post to GitHub.
"The industry seems to like using PLC4X and open-source in general, but doesn't seem to be willing to support the people working on it. So, I will stop providing free community support for PLC4X."
Dutz is one of the six developers supporting PLC4X, a set of libraries used for interfacing with programmable logic controllers (PLCs). These libraries enable unified access from Java, C, and Go programmes to any type of industrial PLCs and IoT devices.
Dutz's dissatisfaction is due to the fact that large industrial firms are able to use Apache PLC4X to save millions of dollars in license fees. But in return, he says, they are not willing to provide adequate assistance to developers.
According to Dutz, his work on Apache PLC4X requires significant manpower and investment. He is now weary of wasting time on free projects and has chosen stop offering free support to PLC4X users.
Dutz also runs a separate IT consultancy called C-ware, which assists businesses in developing and deploying PLC4X software that is tailored to their needs.
C-ware has launched a number of crowdfunding campaigns to adapt Apache PLC4X for Rust, Python, and TypeScript, but they are presently ineffectual and only raise a small amount of money.
Due to the lack of public backing and companies' unwillingness to pay, Dutz says he is now ready to give up.
"This is my final attempt," he wrote in his post.
"If this also doesn't help with getting at least some form of financial attribution for my hard work, I will close down my business and there will be no further form of support from my side."
Dutz's admission comes only days after Marak Squires, another open source developer, purposefully corrupted a pair of his own open-source libraries, on GitHub and software registry NPM - also in protest at corporate's widespread free use of his work.
The open source libraries - Colors.js and Faker.js - started generating gibberish data after Squires allegedly intentionally introduced an infinite loop.
This left several users of popular open-source projects, such as Amazon's Cloud Development Kit, in shock as they saw their applications printing nonsene messages on their console.
Colors and Faker are popular libraries: Colors.js has a userbase of around 23 million over a week, and Faker.js clocks nearly 2.5 million weekly downloads.
In November 2020, Squires wrote in a GitHub post that he no longer wanted to support Fortune 500 and other companies for free.
Open source projects are widely used and any actions that affect them can have far-reaching consequences.
Last year, Filippo Valsorda, a member of the Google Go team and an open source developer, argued that companies should open their wallets and pay for the work they are using.
"Open source software runs the internet, and by extension the economy.
"Volunteers are doing their best in their spare time out of passion, or because they are (or were) having fun. They feel tremendous responsibility, but ultimately can't be expected to persevere in the face of burnout, a change in life circumstances (like, having a kid or changing jobs), or even shifting priorities. They also can't be expected to provide professional levels of performance because, again, no one is paying them and they are well within their rights to do only the fun parts of the 'job'.
"Open Source sustainability and supply chain security are on everyone's slide decks, blogs, and press releases. Big companies desperately need the Open Source ecosystem to professionalise."