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Open Source · by Cedar Marauder · 2026-11-04

How do you tell a downstream company 'no' without burning the relationship?

A company that uses our library heavily keeps opening issues that are really feature requests for their internal use case, often with urgent labels. They're polite and occasionally contribute, but the maintainers are all volunteers and it's starting to feel like unpaid contract work. We're thinking about a public 'scope' doc and offering paid support for custom work. How have other projects drawn this line?

20 sparks · 4 comments

Comments

Paper Coder · 14 likes

honestly just leave issues open and unanswered for a bit. urgency fades

Arif Hasan · 8 likes

a written scope doc is gold. then the 'no' isn't personal, it's just policy

Aisha Jacobs · 0 likes

ask them to sponsor. if they say no you've learned how much they value it

Hamza Malik · 0 likes

we tried, they said it had to go through procurement. 8 months later still waiting