[thwaller]

I have thought long and hard before coming to my opinion here. Since the project has been removed from open source, that means that contributions, like looking into bugs, are no longer open source. I am happy to report issues and help determine where the issue is, but I would then ask that I get paid for my time to help improve your software. As a developer of a paid application, I understand the profit model. As a user of FOSS software, I understand that model as well. The advantage you get from FOSS is community help, which now that there is a cost to the software, that benefit should also be removed.

Just my opinion, and I do not mean this in any negative way. I think your software is great and have been somewhat active in reporting issues and helping to diagnose them. However, I felt my time was "paid for" as there was no charge to me to use it. But now, issues reported end up improving a paid product, and that I will not do. I spend a good amount of time providing debug information to open source projects, but I do so with the understanding that the developer(s) appreciate the help on improvements.

I am happy to continue to report issues as I see them while I still use this product, and I will report with as much detail as I can, but I am not going to spend time trying to debug on my end without compensation.

[mlaggner]

Thanks for your thoughts and your contributions. let me share my thoughts:

- the code is still open source (there has been a picky discussion about that, but you will still see it at https://gitlab.com/tinyMediaManager/tinyMediaManager)
- as I have stated at the beginning of the transition: contributions will get honoured by free licenses - that is the only thing I can give back (except the tool itself ). Paying for contributions will end up in some tricky questions about taxes, how much to pay for a contribution (should that be ok, that a single contribution has a higher €/hour rate than we get for all our work?)
- for my needs tmm has been finished in 2014 - so almost 80% of all the work we do is to implement user requests.. so much time of your contributions is used to improve the tool in the way you want it to (see that as the second thing you get back from us)

So all in all I can thank you for your help and hope you still share some thoughts with us (even if other users benefit from your thoughts too)

[thwaller]

I completely understand. I am speaking as a free user, no license. I cannot contribute code as Java is not my thing. Testing, I am more than willing to do, as long as the result is shared. I hope you did take my message correctly, I love your software and understand wanting to be compensated for your time. But once you cross that line, that applies to all, you are compensated and so are others. If v3 is maintained to the standards needed for future OS versions, I am happy to contribute with no worries, that is fair.

[mlaggner]

Helping us in forums/issue hunting/translating is a contribution too for me! There is no need to contribute Java code. If any user thinks he is eligible for a free license, all he has to do is contact us - I hope that was clear in the first post according to v4... On the other side we've sent out many free licenses when we moved to v4 and only ~20% of all free licenses of contributors have been used

We will include urgent fixes in v3 (as far as this is possible without too much extra work since the code base changes over time and we cannot do all the work twice).