I read more than two thirds of this blog post before realizing the author doesn’t seem to agree with this guy he quoted:
> Then drop it and let someone else maintain it.
To be clear, if maintenance of a popular open source project is too much for you then stop. Taking your marbles and going home is childish, if the authors third party analysis of the motives behind Fleischer‘s behavior is to be believed. The post says on one hand that he never financially benefited but then on the other hand that he’s justified in obscuring the source because maintenance is onerous.
Rather than "taking [his] marbles and going home" isn't it more like he's exercising his right to finally get paid after working for free for the benefit of others (including, presumably, many commercial users who aren't kicking in a cent) for a very long time?
It's not childish. That's the main problem with open source as a whole: devs expect somebody else to maintain projects indefinitely long, for free. This is what's unsustainable.
As discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20174418, with comments from devs represented in that "Software below poverty line" article, the interpretation from the article is seriously flawed.
How is "...then stop" different from "Taking your marbles and going home"? They didn't remove previously-published source code. So you can use the last open release in both scenarios, and the license change only adds the option of getting the maintained version under a commercial license.
The commercial version probably isn't useful in many scenarios, but by the simple rules of logic, having any additional option(s) can never be worse than having fewer options.
It is, however, somewhat shady to implement this license change without announcing it. Indeed I seem to remember being quite confused by this recently. I also just don't understand why that tactic was chosen? If you want to sell software, it tends not to hurt to make people aware of options to give you money.
Well, all I can really think after reading this is “fuck apple”. I’m getting very very tired of their walled off closed shit where they even try to make life as hard as possible for people who try to support it despite the odds.
This isn’t the first time either, it happened to VLC before.
apple kept changing/breaking Api’s to try to kill vlc so that they could try make money of the paid version of the QuickTime player which then existed.
I must admit it was just comments made by VLC devs, so it’s anecdotal.
Did we read the same article? Seems like Apple has been happy for this guy to have a signing certificate for his kernel extension for years. And he has been using it, and everything has been fine. Now the guy decides (not unreasonably, IMO, though it clearly impacts a lot of people who're used to getting the benefit of his efforts for free) that he wants to make some money... and the conclusion is "fuck Apple"?
Well, they allow one blessed developer to have a cert, only for historical reasons, leading to exactly this situation. That doesn’t seem like something to cheer about to me. Like it said in the article, a fork is impossible because they won’t get a cert.
Also, my complaint is mostly that apple keeps changing their API’s, as you can also read in the article.
All together this kind of stuff makes life needlessly hard on third party developers, so yeah, fuck apple.
It's far from impossible, or I wouldn't have to try to figure out which developer accounted for which kexts and whether I should just remove them instead of granting permissions for something like twenty developers when I upgraded to macOS Catalina.
Uh no. There’s nothing that says Apple only allows 1 kext developer. The article only says that getting the dev cert is such a significant pain in the ass that only one has ever gone through the effort. Anyone motivated enough to fork MacFuse can apply.
On a tangent: wouldn’t it be nice if all packages were signed? It would do the community a great service if an organization like Brew negotiated an agreement and implementation with Apple (and something that no one could unilaterally retract).
> The article only says that getting the dev cert is such a significant pain in the ass that only one has ever gone through the effort. Anyone motivated enough to fork MacFuse can apply.
I've been there. It's not just "a royal pain".
I implemented a clean-room Xbox One controller kext to expose it as HID Class gamepad in macOS some years ago†. I paid the Apple dev license on my own dime, and applied multiple times for the dev cert to be upgraded to kext dev. I was rejected each time, the answers each time being entirely tone deaf. Apparently I'm not notable enough, not commercial enough, not big company enough to get either a kext dev cert or an exception in the kext whitelist as others did.
The discussion on GitHub strongly implies that it's more than effort, and that random people don't just get certificates regardless of effort, because Apple is being cagey and reluctant to issue them even to large and prominent companies. I wonder what the specifics of that are...
Well, compromising a kext would be a significant 0wn and quite difficult to explain away.
I can see how Apple would be cagey and reluctant: although it’s technically feasible to revoke compromised publishers imagine the hysteria “OMG Apple kernel got 0wnd!”, “Apple kernel phones home to spy your extensions!”, “Apple can remotely brick your Mac with key revocation!”
It’s bull of course...
... I guess FUSE is one kernel service Apple should just provide out of the box
It was BSD-licensed the whole time, so it's not like you're entitled to an "open-source" application at all. Pay the guy, or use free software so this doesn't happen.
When a FOSS project closes itself off this way, the proper response is to treat it as abandoned and continue development from the last-good version with source available. In particular, MacPorts should not be distributing the binary-only versions. Total disengagement.
You'd be forking 2 year old code, he hasn't updated the repo in the last 2 years, knowing that the next OS release would leave commercial users at his mercy. Apple also doesn't just hand out kernel extension signing certificates to everyone that signs up for a developer account, you'd have to be someone with some reputation.
It was a well-executed fake punt, he'll get people to pay; Catalina is out now and if you want to pick it up from the fork it would take a long time to get it right. That said, I would imagine organizations like Google will make the effort after paying the toll this time because the price will only go up.
It all sounds clever but obviously Catalina was not released yesterday, it was released some time ago and if a companies software required changes for Catalina they should have noticed many months ago while testing on the beta releases.
Problem is that the 2017 version, the last version that's open source, won't run on Catalina (or Mojave or High Sierra for that matter). The amount of fixes and compatibility patches that the author did is quite extensive. Replicating his work would be quite an undertaking and wouldn't be trivial.
It is buried in the footnotes of the post, but the ultimate reason behind going closed source is that Google built their enterprise GDrive syncing client for mac off a fork of osxfuse. The original author of osxfuse feels entitled to some compensation for that and is doing his damnedest to make it happen.
He doesn’t call google out by name but what grandparent says explains this:
> Starting with this release, redistributions bundled with commercial software ...
The question is, is google going to call his bluff and pay up or reassign some internal resources? I’m assuming they’d want their gdrive fork to work on Catalina.
as I interpret most permissive license's, they say something like "must retain the above copyright notice, and this list of conditions.", which makes it not possible to change the license. But you can always go "closed source", and there's nothing stopping you from charging money (which is why Business likes these permissive license's)
Given that the main selling point of permissive licenses is that they make it easy for businesses to incorporate code into a project that can be closed-source for the sake of competitive advantage, this would seem to be an incident that might have been prevented with a license more in line with the author's motivations.
The footnote says Google are using their own fork. Now we don't know when they forked and how much they diverged, but it's quite possible that were going to maintain their own fork, anyway.
It's also noteworthy isn't the "original author of osxfuse". In fact, Google is. So while I can empathise with the general complaint about commercial use, one doesn't get to make that complaint against the one company that originally started the project and released it under a permissive license.
Disagreeing with someone is no excuse for saying their freedom to exercise the rights of an open source license should be restricted, nor for declaring they have no right to speak their mind openly. Open source grants them this freedom, unpalatable as it may be to you.
There is no legal reason preventing their complaint from being made. It may not be well-received by those who demand unlimited reuse without compensation. Regardless, that does not restrict one’s right to make that complaint and take that action.
This isn't a question of rights. Most people understand in English that "can't complain" means "you can complain if you like but won't be taken seriously or regarded as a valid complaint".
Non-disparagement agreements are a common thing in business. They restrict your right to "complain". I regret the conflict between my understanding of English and that of others, but I stand by my statement.
I'm not sure if the dev feels entitled for _compensation_ per se, but G and other companies don't contribute back to the project in any form. Not $ and not in code. Now that is not a very good thing... though technically that's exactly what you get with permissive O/S licenses. It looks like the dev realized that and changed the license.
It also doesn't look like he trusts this companies much, because otherwise he could've just slapped the Commons Clause on his existing license and be done with it. So he closed the source instead.
So, on one hand, it's not a stone soup situation in the sense that it's not like there's any less soup if Google comes and takes all the soup they can eat. On the other hand, open source software only survives when _someone_ contributes needed maintenance, bug fixes, security patches and features. If you don't find a way to incentivize people to contribute, the project can fail. Incentivizing people who are already using your code and have large sacks of cash seems like the easiest place to start.
To many developers, the main reason they contribute to open source software is for the benefit of leveraging each others work. If one is the sole author due to lack of contributions, from that perspective there is no value to the developer in providing it as open source. The problem is compounded if they look around and see companies profiting off of their work and neither contributing fixes/improvements back nor funding the developer(s) who do.
So how is it harmed? By exactly the situation playing out with FUSE: the person who has been maintaining it has been seeing no benefit financial or otherwise and decides to take his ball (the source code) home as he has every right to do. I suspect if he doesn't see some corporate sponsorship soon he may very well decide to stop releasing future updates entirely.
> To many developers, the main reason they contribute to open source software is for the benefit of leveraging each others work.
Then these developers need to understand copyright and licensing, and choose a license that enforces that motive. If you release under BSD, you're not encouraging companies with a profit motive to contribute back.
Fleischer isn't harmed by Google using it, in the same sense that Google isn't harmed by him releasing osxfuse 3.10 under a proprietary license instead of BSD.
For the community it's certainly a pity, but I guess if you consider open source projects to be "default dead", not contributing to keeping it alive isn't the same thing as harming a project community.
> It also doesn't look like he trusts this companies much, because otherwise he could've just slapped the Commons Clause on his existing license and be done with it. So he closed the source instead.
If he doesn't have a copyright assignment, he probably can't easily change the license.
However, if the license is BSD, he can just not release source code. And, if he wasn't getting any contributions anyway then he gets no loss.
No, you don’t need copyright assignment to relicense permissively-licensed code, you (or anyone else really) literally only need to say “fuck it” and start building on the old BSD code with a new license.
It is when you’re relicensing to a less restrictive license, say GPL to BSD, that you need CLA shenanigans beforehand.
I know exactly what you mean, but this is incorrect.
CC is not "closed source". CC makes a license incompatible with the OSI definition of "open source", which is one of the interpretations of the term.
There's a persistent confusion over the difference between OSI's definition and the casual understanding of it. To the laymen, if you can _see_ the source, then it's an _open_ source. And if you can _use_ and _change_ it, then it's a _free_ source.
So when you start claiming that if it's not "OSI's open source", it's "closed source" - it doesn't help matters in the slightest, nor does it help advancing OSI's view of the open source.
Are you going to tell me next that "free speech" means not paying for the radio? And that everything else is just one interpretation of the term? Or that freeware and free software are interchangeable terms?
CC is not open source and does not get to pretend it is. Come up with your own marketing name.
Aka pretend it is. If you have to say that you are not actually <adjective> but only "<adjective>", then this is not an alternative definition but alternative facts (i.e. you are lying to deceive people).
> CC is not open source and does not get to pretend it is.
CC is not a closed source license either, which is what GP claimed. That's the point.
> Come up with your own marketing name.
... and the second point is that OSI zealotry doesn't make anyone any good. "Open" is an ambiguous word. It's the same issue as with "Free software", which is almost universally followed by the "free as in speech, not as in beer" explainer. 25 years in use, still ambiguous.
"Open source" is a misnomer, it doesn't mean exactly what it says. Ideally, it should've been called "libre source" or some other made-up name, but that boat has sailed. And so flipping people off because their understanding of the term is different from the OSI definition only serves to antagonize them and needlessly paint the whole open source movement bad.
Saying this as someone with all side projects released under OSI licenses, some as far back as in mid 90s.
The GP is me. CC is not open source^TM and hence closed source^TM.
> "Open source" is a misnomer,
Sure, but who cares? The fact is that if you tell me "this software is open source" I know that this is a domain specific term and what it means, just like "this is a normal vector". In particular "normal" here means something else than in standard English.
The only thing you are then doing is complaining about how you wanted to use "normal" for your new cool definition.... That ship has sailed.
That's why I prefer the GPL and variants for personal projects that I don't intend to profit off monetarily. It's a conscious choice that I do want compensation, and I don't want to work for free"--but said compensation should be in code and not necessarily in money.
It's why contributing to a BSD-licensed project as a hobby can feel a bit icky, and doing the same on a GPL-licensed project doesn't.
As far as I understand this would be a "mere aggregation" since the application and the kernel module communicate at arms length through the kernel syscall interface https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MereAggregation .
So they'd have to make the source of the kernel extension available (as the GPL requires) but it would not be viral to the application using the kernel extension.
As the FAQ entry says this is a legal question "which ultimately judges will decide" and as far as I know that hasn't happend yet. Which is probably one reason many don't want to do it and err on the safe side and choose another project with non-viral license.
Though as gdrive does have locally installed components, if those used code covered by standard GPL they at least would be covered even if the server-side components were considered separate enough that they would not.
I wasn't aware that osxfuse is distributed by Google. If that is the case then I am sorry for spreading false information and indeed, the GPL would apply.
It's still not clear whether the GPL would apply in the way commenters here think it would.
GPL clauses would only affect Google code upon linking. It's often possible to use fuse style software without linking - they could use it via the command-line and mount whatever they need at startup or even dynamically.
Does osxfuse have a command line tool? Most fuse style software does. If it doesn't, Google could have written a command-line client and open sourced just that.
> GPL clauses would only affect Google code upon linking. It's often possible to use fuse style software without linking - they could use it via the command-line and mount whatever they need at startup or even dynamically.
This doesn't matter. If you distribute the isolated program you need to provide the sources anyway. Having to license other Google code as GPL is not the issue. It's making it required to provide back the changes you've made to fuse itself.
There may be some GPL proponents that really want it to "virally" infect other code. But what atq2119 was describing is just wanting to make sure you at least get back the changes to your own code. That's also why I think the trend towards BSD/MIT in open-source is dangerous. GPL/LGPL/AGPL should be perfectly fine for corporations when used appropriately. They are almost always just ways to make sure the best version of your project doesn't end up closed-source. I can't recall cases of those licenses being used to force other code to be open-sourced but maybe they exist.
GPL also only affects people other than the copyright owner. Google can relicense the code to themselves for their own internal use, if they hold the copyright on all the code they are using.
You conveniently left out the "and variants" in your quote.
I personally wouldn't mind this kind of internal use for the kinds of projects I'm involved in. For the kinds of software that is more likely to play a substantial role in customer-facing services, some people would feel differently. That happens to not be my cup of tea, but in any case there's the AGPL, as another commentor points out. And for yet other situations, there's LGPL.
If I don't want my code to be used in a commercial setting I use AGPL. It's super-banned in every company for which I know the open source policies. It's also the most sensible open source license in today's SAAS world.
Maybe. What we know factually at this point in time: osxfuse was BSD licensed, Google used it and haven't contributed back. osxfuse is popular project.
If it was GPL licensed, do you think Google would bother to use it? Or would they write their own instead? Would we even know about osxfuse then?
MIT/BSD is amazing on bootstrap phase, when getting code used and building user base is top priority. Monetization always comes later. Using GPL from the start might just turn your first users away and you might never manage to get critical mass of users to be able to monetize product at all.
In this particular case we don't know if there were any other previous attempts at financing it, like have maintainer contacted Google to provide consulting services? Or provide enterprise support to other parties? etc.
MIT/BSD is in a kill free software phase, where commercialization of SAAS and other services are king.
MIT/BSD is turning open source software, in to open source dev tools and libraries, no longer is should the end user software be free and open, no just the tools, frameworks, languages, and libraries used to create the end user software
In addition to the sensible question of whether Google even would need to link against any GPL code raised by other commenters, there's also the question of whether the GPL would even make any sense for a kext, considering the kext needs to include Apple's header files (largely APSL-licensed) and link against macOS's kernel. (binary-only proprietary fork of the open source xnu source dump)
(I've licensed my own FOSS kext code as LGPL - either way, the copyleft aspect wouldn't affect any userland code using the kext as it'd be running in a different process. And AGPL doesn't change anything in this context either as far as I'm aware as its additional provisions are only relevant for code running on systems not under the user's control, and again if you're not linking against it, your code isn't a derived work.)
IIRC, FUSE is also required for VeraCrypt to function. So now the source code of this library (module? whatever) that's used by popular encryption software won't be available for public scrutiny. Amazing.
The author is, of course, completely within their rights to stop publishing the source code of their software, but this is a real pity.
The way to go would be for members of the FOSS community to fork the last version of the source code that was published and continue development, but I don't know who (if anyone) will step up and take responsibility.
This also leads to fragmentation, were now you have two popular forks of the same thing which may not be compatible with each other. Sigh.
You make it sound like there's a tonne of FOSS community on-hand just waiting for the chance to step in and create a popular fork that will lead to fragmentation, when he's effectively been the sole maintainer since 2012 [1].
It's far more likely there will no future well maintained OSS forks, he'll continue developing it as a closed-source product, allowing end-users to install it for free but any company who wants access to his future source code and improvements can compensate him for it. This is a far better outcome than it turning it into abandonware where that will stop working in future macOS versions.
> software won't be available for public scrutiny.
It's a popular cliche to think all OSS projects have healthy development communities and many eyes pouring over it, but as he's the only person contributing fixes, the only way the product was going to improve is if he spends more time working on it which is more likely to happen if he can get sponsored to continue working on it.
None of your fears are likely to come to pass and the health of the project would be far worse off if he abandoned it.
1. I'm sorry if I make it sound like that, definitely not my intention. I recognize that there's a serious lack of volunteers and contributors in the FOSS ecosystem.
2. When it comes to FOSS encryption software, it is important that it's audited every-so-often. Relying on closed-source frameworks makes that impossible. All FOSS software may not be scrutinized, but it's a definite advantage that it can be, when the need arises.
Let's all wait for BSD license apologists to insist true freedom is the freedom to blackmail your users.
Props to the OS Xfuse maintainer, he does deserve a fat payout so begrudging him. Still, it paints the clear picture of how BSD is an inferior license when it comes to freedom for users.
Maybe this comment is too slashdot 2006 era, but still, licenses matter.
Correct me if I'm misinformed, but I don't see your point? The original author of code is always free to stop publishing their software as FOSS, regardless of which license they use, as long as they don't try and stop the re-distribution and forking of existing FOSS releases?
I think copyright makes it more complicated than that. If more than one person has ever contributed to the codebase (and if there's not some explicit copyright assignment), then under copyleft licenses no one person would be allowed to distribute anything containing anyone else's copyrighted code without also making the source available. (Perhaps technically it is the case that that's not "allowed" even in the case of a single copyright owner, but then you'd only have to worry about being sued by yourself?)
In this case the original author was an employee of Google and is not the current maintainer.
Google then released their implementation under the BSD. It was forked and worked on, and eventually it now comes to the maintainer. Had GPL been used at any point the current maintainer would not own full copyright and thus not have legal grounds to distribute binaries without source.
Original authors can only unilaterally change licenses if they were the sole authors, or with agreement of all other authors. Or with copyright assignment contracts as you see in GNU projects.
My comment is also not about the maintainer. My comment is about how BSD as a license is often framed as an equivalent choice to GPL or other copyleft licenses.
Years ago this was a topic hackers cared a lot about. Not so much anymore I imagine, but there was indeed a time when hackers cared if their software was open source/copyleft or BSD. Most of the online chatter was hypothetical, today it is practical.
> My comment is also not about the maintainer. My comment is about how BSD as a license is often framed as an equivalent choice to GPL or other copyleft licenses.
Are they really? But they're clearly not the same. Both are "open" licenses, but one is permissive, and the other is strong copyleft. The intentions behind them are quite different, and I don't see how anyone could read them and not understand this.
Still, I don't appreciate the aspersions I see being cast in this thread towards application of the BSD license. When I release OSS, I prefer to do so under MIT license - because I just want to put it out there for people to use, should it prove useful to them. I don't expect anything in return for it, nor do I wish to place restrictions on its use. Why should I be crucified for selecting a license that accurately reflects my intentions?
> Let's all wait for BSD license apologists to insist true freedom is the freedom to blackmail your users.
You assume that the author would have continued working on it if the code was GPLed. If you look at the list of contributors, you'll notice there's only 4 people (besides him) who have contributed any code [1]. That means that had he not continued working on it, the project would have died long ago. GPL doesn't somehow make code write itself. Unless there are incentives for programmers, all projects can perish regardless of what license they use.
In this case, you could also argue that the sole reason why OSXFuse still exists and is being updated is because it's BSD and the author continued releasing it because it was a binary-only release.
Likely the best outcome for the project barring company sponsorship that pays him to continue working on it as OSS.
He's been the sole maintainer on the project since 2012 [1] and has never been compensated for it, he says it will always be free to end users but wants companies that are financially benefiting from it to help sponsor continued development [2]:
> I will never ask end users for financial support. FUSE will always be free. However, what I'm asking for is for companies, that are selling FUSE-based products or rebrand FUSE and bundle it with their apps, to re-invest some of the profits in the continued development of FUSE on macOS, if they can afford it. I don't think that is unreasonable.
So he's just exercising the same BSD rights that all the other companies who have been taking and commercializing his work and not contributing back any fixes or funding for continued development.
Given that the alternative was to abandon the project [3], the only way it was going to see continued development as an OSS project was is if others took over maintenance/development of it, which anyone is free to do by creating and maintaining a fork.
This will keep going on, until FOSS community accepts that beyond university projects, someone pumping up their CVs, having a company sponsorship, or being able to pimp it up with some kind of subscription/consulting, there is little to no money to be made and everyone has bills to pay.
No, this wouldn't have been a problem if the software had been gpl licensed, as the companies would've been forced to give back whatever they changed themselfes, potentially helping him out a lot
But you might be able to pay rent with it if those not wanting to feed back their work wanted the code enough to negotiate a paid licence under other terms.
That can be messy for projects with many past maintainers where the licence options at the time of individual contributions did not explicitly allow this or arbitrary relicensing, but in this case (single current maintainer, other contributions made under a licence that allows him to do this) it needn't be.
I'm not sure how that works, legally. If I understand you, you're suggesting that you can GPL your work to create leverage in a future negotiation with a potential user who wants to modify it privately and/or integrate it into proprietary software.
Can you un-GPL your work for a single entity? Doesn't that mean that you yourself are violating the GPL? I'm legitimately asking, not being rhetorical.
If you're the sole author of the code (or own the copyright or have the ability to relicense), then you can. It's not "un-GPL"ing the code because whatever you GPL'd will continue to be available under the GPL forever.
But you can say, hey, I'm ALSO releasing this code under a separate commercial license that costs $X dollars to get.
Well, that's pretty cool actually. I was unaware that was an option, and I'm pretty sure that many other people don't know that's an option either! It seems eminently fair to ask for money from people who are making money from your thing (and if they aren't, to not ask for anything).
If it were GPL-licensed, they'd have to give back the whole Happy meal, not just the FUSE fries. Perhaps you're thinking about LGPL, or a linking exception of some kind?
Alternatively, he totally could have gone and dual-licensed GPL and a permissive commercial license as a monetization strategy, like the author pointed out.
FUSE is generally shipped as a separate executable, which requires no modifications.
So no, GPL would have changed nothing. Companies would still have been able to ship it unmodified for free without contributing anything.
They could have kept their own code that uses FUSE secret, but even if they had had to release that code, that code is often useless to anyone else. It would not have helped or supported the author of the original code in any way whatsoever.
Or better from a funding PoV: dual licensed. AGPL by default, with non-FOSS licences available for a price.
That way companies or other projects that won't touch *GPL for whatever reason have an option that allows them to use the code while helping the project.
Of course this could make the code incompatible with other open licence (or the licensing policies of some larger projects) so isn't a perfect solution. I'm not sure a perfect solution exists when the project maintainer(s) need income to be able to justify the time to continue their work and have not found some other form of sponsorship.
I'm really curious, what do you want the FOSS community exactly to accept and what would the outcome be?
There are some FOSS business models. Sometimes they work. Sometimes they don't. Overall there's more FOSS than ever before, it's an amazingly successful concept. It doesn't always work, some projects and companies fail or decide to stop being FOSS. That doesn't change the fact that it's an amazingly successful concept.
I think the concept hasn't been as successful as some had hoped for when it comes to moving power and control over software away from big corporations towards users.
As an anti-capitalist movement/dream, open source has utterly failed. As a concept that has provided lots of opportunities for developers and startups it has been a great success.
Agreed. The GPL has been a great success, so much so it's been banned by capitalists in their organizations with the result of dying pretty much everywhere except the kernel, GNU userland and an occasional dual licensed fully enterprise-copyrighted software. BSD with its take it and run with it approach enables people to make a living by modifying (or selling unmodified) software. The situation is dire especially in the internet non-core-router infrastructure.
Personally I mostly associate GPL with capitalism, due to almost all projects controlled by a single for profit company using GPL while community and hobbyist projects more often tend to use BSD/MIT/Apache.
> almost all projects controlled by a single for profit company using GPL
Which ones? The two flagship ones I can think of for GPL, Linux and GCC, don’t really have one company in control of them. And on the flip side LLVM and the browser engines, which are arguably under reasonably strong control of one or two companies, are usually Apache or similar.
The GNU created the GPL and licensed most of their software under it. I can't think of an organization less interested in capitalism. Rather the opposite because the viral nature of the license.
Linus picked the GPL to be less commercial/restrictive than the Minix source code.
All BSD/MIT does is allow it to end up tivoized and remove power from the user. GPL is freedom for the user. BSD is freedom for the dev. Not all users are devs, but all devs are users. Users should take precedence.
Users won't have any power if they don't have software to use. It just happens that BSD (or similar) licenses are easier to deal with when developing things.
I am open to and find some merit in the argument that users could just fork, etc. Using GPL does seem to favor certain profit models more than others inherently, but non are exclusive, and there have been quite a few GPL success stories money wise out there.
I really like RedHat for this reason. It shows that it is the service and support, and the act of maintaining software, that makes it's money, and their books are open so you can see exactly how it works. A comparable startup/project probably won't get VC'd into a unicorn, but there is plenty of room for growth in the GPL software for sale along with service and support category.
I think the developers generally understand that. No sensible person goes into FOSS for the money. It's the customers - consuming non-developers - who have a problem of expectations.
But every person, sensible or not, has bills to pay. When you say "no sensible person goes into FOSS for the money" you are saying "most people can't afford to actively maintain a FOSS project", and you really can't claim that is in any way good for FOSS.
That doesn't sound like much of a change from the last 30 years. FOSS has done fine so far.
Really the only thing that might work is if there was broad community acceptance of not changing all the lower parts of the software stack all the time so the maintenance burden is lower.
Honestly; if we were interested in what was good for FOSS all that needs to happen is that hardware stops improving all the time. Then everyone can calm down, declare things finished and move on without requirements changing. The Linux graphic system (c.f. Xorg v. Wayland) still hasn't finished adjusting to graphics cards. That sort of change is bad for FOSS.
In a sense, this sort of thing is what is being showcased here. The breaking changes to FUSE are probably going to be linked to design changes in Catalina triggered by RAM/CPU/Network changes and the RPM/SSD transition that has been going on for however long. When that sort of thing subsides in 50 years there is going to be this amazing FOSS renaissance as working things stop breaking because of hardware changes and the balance really tilts towards free & available software.
I'm not sure the argument "FOSS has done fine so far" is that convincing when you then lay out many of the places where FOSS has been failing miserably.
Not to forget the many, many places where it has and is succeeding happily.
Here's my "get off my lawn" perspective: those developers who remember a world where there was little or no free software (from, say, the mid-1980's, when Sun made the C compiler a for-cost option on SunOS through until commercial Linux distributions), have a visceral understanding of free software that those who came to it later, and (perhaps understandably) take it for granted, don't have.
Free software is a commons. In a healthy community, people pitch in to help, and maintainers become overwhelmed by the scale of activity, not because they've been left alone to support many users by themselves for years.
I don't think there's any question that this is true.
There are some efforts to address it (eg. SSL, Mongo, etc), but they're the first "drafts" if you like.
When a majority of the users of free software were programmers themselves, things were quite different to today. The world has changed, but the free software model has not kept pace.
With hindsight, I think the "Open Source" definition can be seen as a turning point, and the issues we have today stem from the decisions to give everyone the use of free software, even those who aren't of the community, or able to contribute in turn.
I don't think that was a bad or wrong decision, but I think that the ramifications are still playing out.
> In a healthy community, people pitch in to help, and maintainers become overwhelmed by the scale of activity, not because they've been left alone to support many users by themselves for years.
It's entirely because many of these projects are run by professional software developers, not professional managers. So many projects with single maintainers are that way because the maintainer feels a sense of ownership rather than a sense of stewardship.
It's not to say that solo maintainers are bad people; just that the jobs of writing software and coordinating software development require different, non-overlapping skill sets.
So what? Maybe FOSS cannot get us a competitive modern desktop, but in many areas open source projects have virtually eliminated all proprietary competition. Linux is running everywhere these days and e.g. in databases it is among the open source options where the growth is. Does FOSS need to be able to solve all software problems in the world for you to count it as successful?
Only if by everywhere you mean cloud centers, where the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft have their golden eggs not shared with the community.
If you are going to mention ChromeOS or Android, ChromeOS is hardly a blip outside US school system, and what kernel is being used on Android is irrelevant to user space, there is Fuschia on the horizon and Google has been replacing everything, with the Linux kernel being the last piece of GPL code standing.
Then if you mean embedded, plenty of IoT OS are MIT based and even Linux Foundation now has Zephyr as alternative to Linux, all operating systems where OEM can profit without giving anything back.
If you mean compilers, plenty of embedded OEMs are now happy LLVM users free of contributions, while reducing their development costs.
> That doesn't sound like much of a change from the last 30 years. FOSS has done fine so far.
Compared to what knowledge of how good it could be if we had a more sustainable model than hoping someone has the charity or hobby to work on something we need for free?
This reminds me of when gamers assert how game modding has done fine so far limited to just labors of love and weekend hobbyism. Though I'm sure gamers are more coming from an angle of not wanting to pay for anything, we can only imagine the gaming mods we'd have if we had more of a culture around allowing people to work full-time on things we enjoy instead of only waiting for the few hobbyists with the masochism or compulsion to do it.
The charitable part of the economy is pretty effective. You need to compensate people a lot before they'll do for you what they might otherwise do for free.
Modding is fundamentally different, because it's always beholden to the whims of the IP owner of the original game. They tend not to allow people to build profitable mods, since they see that profit as rightfully theirs.
"Most people can't afford to actively maintain a FOSS project" has always been true. It has been a hobby for some, a privilege allowed by the workplaces of others, and in a few rare cases companies have been built that charge for consulting and manage to fund a distro or other project that way. Or dual-license tech like Trolltech.
Most people can't afford to do effectively anything other than go to work and flop on the couch.
I don't think that's a problem for FOSS, it's a problem (if you call it such) of the economic system that we live under.
Generally the only realistic answer to that for most people at an individual level is to focus on financial security so that you don't have to care about that sort of fluff.
Most people can't. That's how our world works. In the general case creatives earn effectively nothing and only a few blockbuster individuals 'make it', regardless of the field; and usually they have to go proprietary to some extent.
well, going FOSS can be an effective marketing strategy: by making something open and free (in both meanings) you get much higher probability of that something becoming popular. That in turn gives a lot new opportunities to sell complementary something or other something. This is best case scenario though, and you need to have resources/other sources of income for the time it needs to get widely adopted and popular (or the very possibility that it will not happen at all)
> going FOSS can be an effective marketing strategy: by making something open and free (in both meanings) you get much higher probability of that something becoming popular. That in turn gives a lot new opportunities to sell complementary something or other something.
Right, and then people try to do that, fail to sell whatever it is that they thought they would, and end up putting some sort of annoyance on the code to punish those who are using it.
> It's the customers - consuming non-developers - who have a problem of expectations.
If FOSS zealotry wasn't a thing, then said expectations would be unreasonable. Sadly we live in a world where many people can withstand the cognitive dissonance of "You should use FOSS" and "You shouldn't complain about it because it is free".
If the end goal is earning an income, sure. Yet there are other reasons to adopt an open source model. It is useful as a collaborative model. For that to happen, people have to be willing to submit code and the maintainer has to be willing to accept code. It sounds like that was not happening here.
That said, the FOSS community has created bigger companies and made bigger money than some of your favourite commercial projects (proprietary compilers, etc).
I would hazard that that main reason that many (by no means all) FOSS projects are migrating to LLVM is that clang is dramatically easier to work on, and at or over parity in efficiency of output.
First, why should they contribute? You make it sound like a problem for the FOSS guys being exploited, but the choice of license is usually made explicitly to allow third parties to profit from their project without the burden of contribution.
Second, despite not having to contribute, license while, LLVM has still seen so much contribution from big companies (Apple for one) that the whole argument is moot.
Third, I meant companies like RedHat, or projects like Mongo, MySQL and others -- far more successful money-wise than most niche commercial compilers the kind that you appear to be a fan of while deriding FOSS for not making money...
the Libre Software community understands this, which is one of the reasons we push for the Use of Copy-Left licenses, and not Permissive licenses.
So something like what happened here is not even possible. If the FUSE project on OSX would have been GPL from the beginning this person would not be able to change the licensing since he originally forked it, unless he rewrote all of the GPL code in a clean room rewrite which is not really realistic
If it was GPL from the beginning, wouldn't it be a "ZFS on Linux" like situation?
I don't think you can legally distribute GPL kernel modules for non GPL kernels. Even if you linked the module to the Darwin code, which is released under an OSS license (APSL), the two are not compatible and it's not clear if redistribution is fine (see "Darling: macOS compatibility for Linux")
I know a lot of FOSS contributors but have never met one IRL that seriously believes there is money in it. Outside of people on internet platforms (that by and large aren't to be taken seriously to begin with), have you encountered real zealots like this? I doubt that they exist in truly great numbers.
Absolutely -- sustainability requires there to be money involved.
Honestly, the only model that seems to work in the long-term is corporate-backed OSS where maintainers are paid a salary. Professionalism endures long after the passion has faded.
Well, in this specific case, I think the best outcome would be for Apple to merge the module in the MAC OSX kernel so it's there by default, FUSE is kind of a de-facto standard and is clearly a widely useful piece of code.
But, big picture, yes a lot of OSS projects have the same issue. Funding is clearly one aspect, but another aspect is also to work on having less "single person projects" (and I'm not talking about one time PRs but a genuine second core developer). I'm not sure how to encourage that however, maybe more commonly adding "HELP WANTED!" in the project README, maybe a button "I want to become a permanent contributor of <PROJECT>" button in Github, I don't know. If you are alone on a project, even if funded, chances are you will loss interest after a while, leaving the project with tons of possible improvements not realized, and a on/off maintenance, having more "N>1 core developers projects" would help mitigate that.
Adding someone into a solo project introduces social overhead. That's not necessarily a bad thing and can even be a very good thing (I much prefer making music with other people and seeing how our influences mix as opposed to making music solo). But there is a cost/risk there which I could certainly see some solo developers just not being interested in taking on.
On the other hand, since this is OSS, if an organization does need N>1 badly enough, then they can commit their own resources to it, forking if necessary.
I wouldn't mind if there was a "DONATE" button, I'd certainly donate 5$ or 10$. Under these circumstances even more since this driver is unique and several other drivers I use depend on it. (sshfs, perkeep, ext4fuse, ...) Probably these small but frequently used projects should also be supported by the FSF, at least in the *GPL case.
So this is an area of significant interest to me. I have researched this extensively, talked to a few dozen medium-to-large OSS maintainers, and have a project on the back burner about this. The only conclusion I've been able to draw is that literally every approach from OpenCollective to a PayPal link demonstrably does not work. Donations do not work.
You have to give people something of value, even if nominal value, to actually get corporate interest and to drive the kind of ROI that makes it viable to continue spending so much dang time on these projects. And a lot of people pfft at that and wave their hands about their right to other people's free time (or that an invisible hand will Make Things Work should those people choose to spend their free time in other ways, ignoring that that usually just means other people get to burn out instead). The only sustainable way to build open-source software is to get businesses to pay for it. And that's why we're where we are with these conversations: it's not the end-user free riders who matter, it's the commercial ones.
(I don't think the Redis license is the right approach, FWIW. I think there are better ones. Happy to chat offline with folks who have a similar interest in this space; email's in my profile.)
Basically it comes down to companies having systems for paying invoices. It's hard to get small and medium sized companies to make charitable donations - especially to open source which doesn't even help their corporate social responsibility goals.
> Likely the best outcome for the project barring company sponsorship that pays him to continue working on it as OSS.
The project page on github mentions two sponsors though, Boxcryptor and Editshare. I don´t know any of the story behind this though, just tought I should mention it.
> He's been the sole maintainer on the project since 2012 [1] and has never been compensated for it
I have to object to that. I work for a company which pays him to build branded versions of FUSE for macOS, and has been doing so for several years.
He does reliably ship us new builds, but it has sometimes been a little difficult to get him to respond to feature requests or even patches that we send him.
I don't believe that he is scaling much better with his commercial licensing than he was as a FLOSS maintainer.
As it is, we're fairly happy with his work to continue to support new versions of macOS, which is fairly hard to ship systems software on these days (the code signing and notarization requirements keep getting more and more onerous, system integrity protection keeps getting in the way of debugging, and so on), but it would be nice if we weren't limited to a single person working on the project.
I'd really rather he kept the project open source, and continued to provide custom builds for companies on a contract basis. Due to the difficulties of building and signing the kernel extension across all of the versions of macOS that it supports, just having the source available but keeping the binaries under a proprietary license would probably be sufficient to make it worth the while of most companies to license with him to provide custom builds like we do.
Sounds like a lot of additional work for him to provide custom builds? Maybe he wants to be paid for the core product development that provides most of the value?
No, the custom builds aren't much more work than the vanilla builds, it's getting the build environment set up in the first place that's a pain, since you have to build against a different SDK for each version of macOS you support; and the custom builds are what he sells to customers, since with a custom build it can be installed and updated independently of the free-as-in-beer version that is used for things like SSHFS and might be updated out from under you in a way that breaks your application. Updating with your application means that you can test each new version and fix any issues or report back to him before shipping it.
I'm not sure if the signing process actually matters in this case? If the signing step is the limiting factor in maintaining a fork, he could have switched to the GPL and achieved the same result (commercial redistribution requiring a paid license) while maintaining the benefit of being open source.
I'm surprised it doesn't say anything about security concerns with depending on a single individual to develop a kernel module without any ability to audit the code.
Well, I'd be surprised if companies like Dropbox and Google didn't audit it. And if it is used as much the article says, it would also be a decent target for security researchers, if for no other reason than they could send a bounty request to the big companies that rely on it.
Dropbox doesn't use FUSE -- in large part because I was terrified of adopting 60k LoC in the kernel (from FUSE) that we weren't experts on versus 1k LoC that we actually needed (and had audited by third parties).
I hope we see more of this in the future: developers realising that the work they do has value and that they’re not required to spend their lives giving it away for free. So they take control of their work product and start capturing some of that value for themselves.
It’s a shame that the article is written in this tone, as it mirrors the dominant sentiment among open source folks. There is still a lot of entitlement to be seen, even here in the comments from people who are likely to end up in the same boat as the software author referenced in the article.
> It’s a shame that the article is written in this tone
The article seemed pretty neutral excluding the slightly shady stuff like not mentioning the license change properly, timely or even in expected locations
> the dominant sentiment among open source folks
The dominant sentiment of open source folks is that they want open source instead of proprietary software? That seems expected, it’s after all the whole point.
That's a lie, lots of people donate voluntarily for their favorite free software every day. If you decide to be a leech that's fine too, but don't try to convince yourself others are that way as well.
Since you brought up the Linux Foundation as an example, the large pool of contributions are from Fortune 500 happy to use Linux instead of paying for UNIX licenses.
Which in any case only a tiny part of kernel contributors can live from.
Tiny part? Your immediate preceding sentence observes that the large pool of kernel contributors live on salaries provided to them by Fortune 500 companies.
Is that a roundabout way of admitting that you're wrong and open source can be sustainable?
Not even close, because those developers are employees from Fortune 500 companies in one way or the other, they are not being paid by other developers paying to use Linux based software as such.
I don't understand. "Not even close to sustainable", you say, then complete the sentence by describing the situation in which Linux has been and continues to be sustainable.
What is the relevance of that part? Your claim that open source projects can't be sustainable is straightforwardly false, regardless of whether there are any Linux developers who are payed by other developers in order to use Linux-based software.
Similarly, your claim that "open source folks" don't value open source software as worth paying for is straightforwardly false, regardless of whether they pay out of their personal bank accounts or push their Fortune 500 employers to donate money and time (which every Fortune 500 calculates in terms of money).
Linux Foundation is an obvious example of big corporations paying for the development of a project they rely on: most money comes from huge corporate membership fees, most code comes from salaried programmers at those corporations.
Most devs though would balk at the idea of paying for Linux.
Yes, big corporations like Google, who is perfectly capable of paying for osxfuse, too.
Balk? You think the MBAs at those big corporations are pushing them to pay for Linux over the objections of the devs? No, devs don't balk, devs are the reason those companies are paying for Linux.
What in the world do any of your points have to do with the discussion at hand? My parent, pjmlp, claimed that (1) open source can't be sustainable because (2) open source supporters don't value open source work as being worth paying for, both of which are contradicted by the incontrovertible facts that (1) sustainable open source projects exist and (2) they're sustainable because of open source supporters who pay for it. Corporate supporters, yes, but corporations are composed of people, and corporate supporters of open source are only that way because their "open source folk".
- There are very few sustainable opensource projects.
- Of those which are, such as Linux, they are sustainable not because community cares about them (they might or might not) or because community pays for them (they might or might not), but because corporations find enough vested in them to support them (through money and/or people). I highly doubt Linux Foundation is sustainable without corporate sponsors.
- If you ask a typical dev to pay for a Linux distribution, they will balk at it. A one-off donation? Maybe. And that's Linux, a major and a clearly expensive project. How many projects are there that we take for granted? How many of them are sustained by the oh-so-great-and-generous open source community? Dozens? Less?
There's a very clear division:
- Strategic projects with vested interests get picked up my huge corporations (or started by them).
- A few lucky projects get enough traction to be able to live off donations whole working on them full time.
- The absolute vast majority of all the rest can and do survive only because devs can afford to work on them. As soon as they can't, good bye development and support.
So...you're not disagreeing with anything I said, you're just trying to educate me on how difficult it is to build sustainable open source projects? Thanks, I'm painfully aware, I have experience maintaining an unsustainable open source project.
Or maybe you are trying to disagree with me, in the self-contradictory sentence in which you state that projects like Linux are not sustainable because community cares about them, but because community members find enough vested in them to support them. What's the difference between "care about" and "vested in and support"?
Or, for some reason, you and pjmlp don't consider people who work at corporations to be "community members". Turns out if you exclude most of the people who are paid to work on open source, then you find that there's no money being put into open source!
Look, I'm sorry to be snarky, but it's frustrating to be told facts that don't contradict nor add to what I've been saying, and that I'm already all too aware of. I don't know what point you're trying to make.
If you're just trying to point out that many important open source projects can't get corporate backing to become sustainable, again, I already know that from painful personal experience, but in the case of osxfuse it actually seems like it is in a position to get Google to pay up, and in any case the problem of sustainability in open source is squarely not the open source community's fault like pjmlp implied. That's been my point the whole time. I don't know what yours is.
18 years ago, since then it's been open source and paid for by donations
>and has some big studios doing those donations
These big studios started donating this past year when the development fund was started (and really took off during the latter part of this year for some reason), before that it was donations and in later years also the Blender Cloud service.
>And I bet only a lucky few of the contributors get to see the money.
Well, most (if not all) of the Blender developers now working full time where Blender contributors, also Blender is a non-profit organization.
I think there should be either a dual licensing model, where if a company earns more than X$ they need to pay a license, if you are a student wanting to learn more about how its implement then it's free, or you just have to pay for it.
OSS has killed indie development, for the benefit of large corporations. Thousands of developers out there are putting in their own sweat blood and tears in advancing "humanity" by building great OSS products, only to be taken advantage of. Seal the pipe. Charge money for great work!
We lived in that world a few decades ago, it sucked for users, and where it's still common practice, it still sucks for users, and the only players really allowed to play that game are a few big names.
There is. Ditch Apple and use sane systems without some control obsessive entities constantly hovering over you and dictating you how to (or not to) use them.
Developers abandoning Apple should be the taste of their own medicine for them.
The FUSE maintainer (and this article) implies that kernel driver signing certificates are so difficult to get that forking is not realistic, even without considering the technical issues.
I don't know if that is true, but if it is, then that is a certainly due to Apple policies.
It's also interesting to contrast with Linux FUSE, which to my knowledge has never been associated with any maintainer drama.
Doesn't matter. Apple is a gatekeeper, and that was exactly my point. They cultivate such kind of approach, and maintainer becoming a gatekeeper simply mirrors their own attitude.
The heart of the matter is that a fairly small number of people on a proprietary UNIX are mad that they have to pay money to continue to be free riders on the Free Software movement.
Mr Fleischer has done a huge amount of unpaid work so a narrow segment of wealthy software workers can avoid the choice between paying for proprietary software and supporting Free Software, after spending thousands of dollars on a MacOS system
No world has ever produced a violin small enough to play an elegy for those “victims.”
If you wanted a Free Software FUSE, maybe a Linux desktop would have been a better choice?
Becayse you're free to take the existing source code and adapt the software to work with your choice of OS and hardware. There is no requirement for free software to support every platform in existence out of the box.
I fail to see how that is in any way the heart of the matter. The articles mentions someone being mad completely in passing, in a quoted tweet. If anyone in this HN thread is mad, they're a tiny minority because I haven't seen any.
Instead it seems more like the heart of your comment is that you view everything in terms of an ideological battle between the Free Software movement and everyone else. So when you came upon an article and HN thread calmly discussing a maintainer's decision to change their project's license for understandable reasons but in a somewhat underhanded way, you immediately sorted everyone into heroes and villains and self-righteously took a stand.
> "you immediately sorted everyone into heroes and villains and self-righteously took a stand"
And when you proclaim that this person "views everything in terms of an ideological battle between the Free Software movement and everyone else", would you say that's a more nuanced and balanced take on the matter?
They might seem to be, so let me explain: To me it looked like you were doing exactly what you accused the other poster of -- immediately sorting them into the 'villain' bin and taking a self-righteous stand against them.
Interesting. To me, calling people "calm" doesn't sound particularly heroic, nor does calling someone "self-righteous" sound particularly villainous when I don't suggest they did any harm. Being harmlessly self-righteous may be embarrassing, perhaps, but hardly villainous.
By contrast, "free riders", "huge amount of unpaid work [for] wealthy software workers", "No world has ever produced a violin small enough to play an elegy for those “victims.”"—I don't think I addressed my parent in remotely approaching that much disdain.
I had a project planned for iOS[0] that would have been so much better if it could use FUSE, but looks like it can't happen now.
If someone wants to try, having a generic link between FUSE and File Providers in iOS will be a great addition. You could make a generic application that interoperates various FUSE projects against the File Provider API in iOS, so you could mount all sort of crazy stuff in iOS Files application.
It's API is not very clear, but it does seem to have roughly equivalent functionality to FUSE. The only obvious restriction is that there must be a physical file on disk rather than doing everything in-memory.
The restriction is that the FileProvider api is only used by desktop applications for user files. You can’t for instance run the application itself from there.
I'm fortunate enough to have been paid to do open source code for the last ~10 years or so. I am thus a huge open source & free source advocate, and I am completely biased for it.
I think everything done here seems legal, because BSD licensing pretty much allows for this (I am not a lawyer though, and I haven't examined how things were with third-party contributions for example).
Morally, the only fault I can say on the maintainer's behavior is a lack of transparency. This kind of decisive move ideally should be accompanied by an equally decisive communication effort. Trying to do this "quietly" isn't an option when a big number of users and/or big players are involved (as it seems Google is involved to some extent).
> Morally, the only fault I can say on the maintainer's behavior is a lack of transparency.
Totally agree with that. The maintainer seems to have made very little effort to get compensated for his work. It would surely be nice if some company stepped-up and offered to sponsor the development of the project. But it's also kind of childish to scheme and hold grudges for not getting something you never bothered asking for.
Other open-source developers have been in a similar position in the past, but the handling of the situation was much more transparent and considerate. Off the top of my head, I can remember the example of Synergy [1]. When the developer needed support, he announced well in advance the changes to the model of development. And actually put the time to spin-up a company around the project, and offer ways for normal users to support development.
I'm very happy for you getting paid to contribute to open source. I wish I could find someone willing to sponsor me. My field is fairly narrow though with few users and not that much commercial action.
Just to clarify. I'm not "sponsored". I am payed to do software. Something someone else wants done. I wouldn't work on it on my free time. But it's still open source.
Reading the article I cant understand, how is it possible for other companies distribute patched version of FUSE module, if they don't have certificate to sign it?
this quite reminds of the openssl saga, but on a smaller scale, with single developer more or less responsible for world's encryption for decade.
it's a pity, it's a shame that companies who use FOSS benefit, but do not understand (or do, but ignore) the idea of FOSS, which is to give back to community. this also includes other FOSS companies, etc as everyone uses openssl, zlib and sqlite.
to base a project on FOSS requires that you contribute back. or pay back if you can. and when your business makes 1000$ then 1$ out of every 1000$ for the FOSS guy that made it possible is money worth spending, isn't it?
if it's true that VeraCrypt, the G company and others based work on this developer's efforts and forgot, for decade, to give back anything, well - it's well deserved to leave them staring at the blank repo. well deserved indeed, as they had plenty of time and resource to compensate the author while reaping benefits off his work. well done to choose the BSD license in this case.
all other companies building big-software based on hundreds opensource projects should rethink their strategies.
there is no free lunch, someone pays for it. and its a shame, when this someone is left alone to pay for his lunch, while hundreds benefit from it. maybe there should be the FOSS Church and at least make these people revered as saints.
Why should companies give back when the code was licenced in such a way as to not require it?
If a developer works on a project and wants commercial companies to give back then they can choose a suitable licence such as GPLv3; if they just want to get their code out there and don't really mind how it's used then BSD is more suitable.
Maybe they don't need to, but it would be good to have an ecosystem that incentiviszed sharing instead of relegating it to an altruistic few. That's on both the companies and the creators.
If a large software company had to pay 0.1% of its profit (revenue?) to each foss dependency they wouldn't have any left.
And contributing back is not as easy as lobbing code over the wall, you have to spend a lot of time and energy coming to agreements on what makes sense to share and how to organize it. It would probably be a full time job for Mr Benjamin to vet external contributions even if everyone could agree that all were desirable.
From the amount of people complaining here, it seems to me more like everyone is now pissed off that the supplier decided to go elsewhere and stop offering gratis services, as means to pay their bills.
I am afraid there's nothing people can do about this issue: according to https://github.com/osxfuse/osxfuse/blob/master/LICENSE.txt the project is BSD licensed and AFAIK closing the sources of a BSD-licensed project ("re-licensing") is allowed.
Yep, he's allowed to do this and people basically have to suck it up.
This couldn't have happened if the code was GPL-licensed.
This might be a good occasion take a moment to think about all the BSD-licensed software you're currently using, and imagine it disappearing just like this piece of software. Then go back to your repository and re-license as much as you can as GPLv3.
If he wanted to switch to GPL, he wouldn't have to relicence all the code; just the code that is by him alone. The contributions by others are in a permissive license that is compatible with the GPL, so they could remain in their current state; but the whole project would contain GPL code so anyone redistributing the project would have to do abide with the terms of the GPL.
A key problem is getting people to pony up. People are all for "the community" and the maintainers doing right by "the community" when that means they (as a member of the community) get the benefit of the code. They are often less vocal about being part of the community then the project maintainers ask for financial assistance, generally assuming that other people will chip in so it'll be OK if they don't.
This isn't just commercial interests: this is private individuals too. Welcome to the idealism of F/OSS rubbing up against less altruistic parts of human nature.
While I'm judging others I'll have to hold my hands up and say that, while I have helped out some projects in the past via both bug-fix contributions and small financial ones, and having opened some of my projects in the dim & distant past, I don't think I can claim to be a net contributor by any wider measure.
I don't see this as idealism vs a selfish human nature, not directly at least. The maintainer has been delivering a low level open-source product within a proprietary operating system. That's got to be tough, and as the article states, it's the main source of hurdles to others taking up the project.
There is one huge thing that can be done about this. Push the commercial users of osxfuse to penny up and share some profit. According to the article they are using osxfuse for free and not contributing any code back either.
If you use software that is dependent on osxfuse....send an email to your sales contact and let them know that they need to contribute back to the community.
> Now this may come as a shock to some of you, but Apple really doesn’t seem to like it when third party developers change just about anything about their UX
> Deploying a kext requires it be signed using a special Kernel Extension Signing Certificate, which can only be acquired from Apple
this restriction has nothing to do with them not liking people doing stuff about their UX and everything to do about the fact that kernel extensions bypass all security boundaries between users and processes.
Kernel extensions are bloody dangerous and I'm happy with Apple putting additional scrutiny on them.
That's a difficult question because it might limit supply of open machines for users who want the freedom to hack their own stuff. I think it's okay to offer computers that are basically Facebook appliances, but there should always be a toggle somewhere that allows people who know what they're doing to do whatever they please.
Macs do have such a toggle. You can boot from the recovery partition, launch the terminal and issue the `csrutil disable` command.
This will turn off all the security features that have been added over the years, including the “Catalina Vista” prompts people were complaining about in September.
The reason this requires booting from the recovery partition is to make it impossible for malware to flip the switch and to make it convoluted enough that even the most gullible of users will question their actions when pushed to do these steps by malware.
(Apple has stated publicly and in very clear language that they fully intend for the Mac to continue to be able to run unsigned code, so I believe this toggle isn’t temporary)
> This will turn off all the security features that have been added over the years, including the “Catalina Vista” prompts people were complaining about in September.
I installed it back in June, so my memory might be a bit hazy, but as far as I’m aware SIP doesn’t control TCC.
Yep. Same with Windows; you get a big red screen and warning message when checks are disabled. You have to be able to do this in order to develop custom drivers and kernel extensions.
One the one hand, it makes it difficult for regular users to install malicious root-kits, but it also limits all wide scale adoption of FOSS tech like this at the pure whims and discretion of Apple.
think of it this way - like all the other companies, he's maintained his own private fork of the open source osxfuse code. his happens to work on catalina, and he's telling those companies that if their forks do not, he's willing to sell them access to his code.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 370 ms ] thread> Then drop it and let someone else maintain it.
To be clear, if maintenance of a popular open source project is too much for you then stop. Taking your marbles and going home is childish, if the authors third party analysis of the motives behind Fleischer‘s behavior is to be believed. The post says on one hand that he never financially benefited but then on the other hand that he’s justified in obscuring the source because maintenance is onerous.
See "Software below poverty line": https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html
Most comments are:
- it's true
- exploitation is a wrong term
- you don't take into account devs who are already employees and work on OSS
The commercial version probably isn't useful in many scenarios, but by the simple rules of logic, having any additional option(s) can never be worse than having fewer options.
It is, however, somewhat shady to implement this license change without announcing it. Indeed I seem to remember being quite confused by this recently. I also just don't understand why that tactic was chosen? If you want to sell software, it tends not to hurt to make people aware of options to give you money.
This isn’t the first time either, it happened to VLC before.
I must admit it was just comments made by VLC devs, so it’s anecdotal.
Also, my complaint is mostly that apple keeps changing their API’s, as you can also read in the article.
All together this kind of stuff makes life needlessly hard on third party developers, so yeah, fuck apple.
On a tangent: wouldn’t it be nice if all packages were signed? It would do the community a great service if an organization like Brew negotiated an agreement and implementation with Apple (and something that no one could unilaterally retract).
I've been there. It's not just "a royal pain".
I implemented a clean-room Xbox One controller kext to expose it as HID Class gamepad in macOS some years ago†. I paid the Apple dev license on my own dime, and applied multiple times for the dev cert to be upgraded to kext dev. I was rejected each time, the answers each time being entirely tone deaf. Apparently I'm not notable enough, not commercial enough, not big company enough to get either a kext dev cert or an exception in the kext whitelist as others did.
https://github.com/lloeki/xbox_one_controller/issues/2#issue...
† that was before they went bluetooth HID compliant, and anyway, even the new ones on USB are not exposed as USB HID.
I can see how Apple would be cagey and reluctant: although it’s technically feasible to revoke compromised publishers imagine the hysteria “OMG Apple kernel got 0wnd!”, “Apple kernel phones home to spy your extensions!”, “Apple can remotely brick your Mac with key revocation!”
It’s bull of course...
... I guess FUSE is one kernel service Apple should just provide out of the box
1. osxfuse is effectively closed source but the license is not changed
2. there's no open source fuse on latest version of OS X
3. most importantly, having only one maintainer for osxfuse is clearly not sustainable
I don't really use OS X so mostly have an interest in this because some of my users are on OS X.
It was a well-executed fake punt, he'll get people to pay; Catalina is out now and if you want to pick it up from the fork it would take a long time to get it right. That said, I would imagine organizations like Google will make the effort after paying the toll this time because the price will only go up.
> Starting with this release, redistributions bundled with commercial software ...
The question is, is google going to call his bluff and pay up or reassign some internal resources? I’m assuming they’d want their gdrive fork to work on Catalina.
Edit: Interestingly, from https://github.com/osxfuse/osxfuse/blob/master/LICENSE.txt:
> FUSE for macOS is a fork of MacFUSE. MacFUSE has been developed by Google Inc..
I mean he changed the license away from BSD now, so, that works too.
https://code.google.com/archive/p/macfuse/
It's also noteworthy isn't the "original author of osxfuse". In fact, Google is. So while I can empathise with the general complaint about commercial use, one doesn't get to make that complaint against the one company that originally started the project and released it under a permissive license.
Disagreeing with someone is no excuse for saying their freedom to exercise the rights of an open source license should be restricted, nor for declaring they have no right to speak their mind openly. Open source grants them this freedom, unpalatable as it may be to you.
There is no legal reason preventing their complaint from being made. It may not be well-received by those who demand unlimited reuse without compensation. Regardless, that does not restrict one’s right to make that complaint and take that action.
It also doesn't look like he trusts this companies much, because otherwise he could've just slapped the Commons Clause on his existing license and be done with it. So he closed the source instead.
https://commonsclause.com/
Amit Singh literally created the project while at Google.
I am still waiting for someone to explain why open-source software is harmed by people using it, if they don't contribute back.
So how is it harmed? By exactly the situation playing out with FUSE: the person who has been maintaining it has been seeing no benefit financial or otherwise and decides to take his ball (the source code) home as he has every right to do. I suspect if he doesn't see some corporate sponsorship soon he may very well decide to stop releasing future updates entirely.
Then these developers need to understand copyright and licensing, and choose a license that enforces that motive. If you release under BSD, you're not encouraging companies with a profit motive to contribute back.
For the community it's certainly a pity, but I guess if you consider open source projects to be "default dead", not contributing to keeping it alive isn't the same thing as harming a project community.
If he doesn't have a copyright assignment, he probably can't easily change the license.
However, if the license is BSD, he can just not release source code. And, if he wasn't getting any contributions anyway then he gets no loss.
It is when you’re relicensing to a less restrictive license, say GPL to BSD, that you need CLA shenanigans beforehand.
CC is not "closed source". CC makes a license incompatible with the OSI definition of "open source", which is one of the interpretations of the term.
There's a persistent confusion over the difference between OSI's definition and the casual understanding of it. To the laymen, if you can _see_ the source, then it's an _open_ source. And if you can _use_ and _change_ it, then it's a _free_ source.
So when you start claiming that if it's not "OSI's open source", it's "closed source" - it doesn't help matters in the slightest, nor does it help advancing OSI's view of the open source.
If you can _see_ the source, then it is _shared_ source (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_Source_Initiative). If you can _use_ and _change_ it, then it's a _open_ source.
Are you going to tell me next that "free speech" means not paying for the radio? And that everything else is just one interpretation of the term? Or that freeware and free software are interchangeable terms?
CC is not open source and does not get to pretend it is. Come up with your own marketing name.
Yup, and the OS in OSI stand for, guess what, "open source".
Aka pretend it is. If you have to say that you are not actually <adjective> but only "<adjective>", then this is not an alternative definition but alternative facts (i.e. you are lying to deceive people).
CC is not a closed source license either, which is what GP claimed. That's the point.
> Come up with your own marketing name.
... and the second point is that OSI zealotry doesn't make anyone any good. "Open" is an ambiguous word. It's the same issue as with "Free software", which is almost universally followed by the "free as in speech, not as in beer" explainer. 25 years in use, still ambiguous.
"Open source" is a misnomer, it doesn't mean exactly what it says. Ideally, it should've been called "libre source" or some other made-up name, but that boat has sailed. And so flipping people off because their understanding of the term is different from the OSI definition only serves to antagonize them and needlessly paint the whole open source movement bad.
Saying this as someone with all side projects released under OSI licenses, some as far back as in mid 90s.
> "Open source" is a misnomer,
Sure, but who cares? The fact is that if you tell me "this software is open source" I know that this is a domain specific term and what it means, just like "this is a normal vector". In particular "normal" here means something else than in standard English.
The only thing you are then doing is complaining about how you wanted to use "normal" for your new cool definition.... That ship has sailed.
osxfuse is a fork of Google's MacFuse...
It's why contributing to a BSD-licensed project as a hobby can feel a bit icky, and doing the same on a GPL-licensed project doesn't.
This is a pretty common misunderstanding. Google is using oxfuse internally and does not distribute it, so the GPL would not change anything here.
As the FAQ entry says this is a legal question "which ultimately judges will decide" and as far as I know that hasn't happend yet. Which is probably one reason many don't want to do it and err on the safe side and choose another project with non-viral license.
Though as gdrive does have locally installed components, if those used code covered by standard GPL they at least would be covered even if the server-side components were considered separate enough that they would not.
GPL clauses would only affect Google code upon linking. It's often possible to use fuse style software without linking - they could use it via the command-line and mount whatever they need at startup or even dynamically.
Does osxfuse have a command line tool? Most fuse style software does. If it doesn't, Google could have written a command-line client and open sourced just that.
This doesn't matter. If you distribute the isolated program you need to provide the sources anyway. Having to license other Google code as GPL is not the issue. It's making it required to provide back the changes you've made to fuse itself.
There may be some GPL proponents that really want it to "virally" infect other code. But what atq2119 was describing is just wanting to make sure you at least get back the changes to your own code. That's also why I think the trend towards BSD/MIT in open-source is dangerous. GPL/LGPL/AGPL should be perfectly fine for corporations when used appropriately. They are almost always just ways to make sure the best version of your project doesn't end up closed-source. I can't recall cases of those licenses being used to force other code to be open-sourced but maybe they exist.
I personally wouldn't mind this kind of internal use for the kinds of projects I'm involved in. For the kinds of software that is more likely to play a substantial role in customer-facing services, some people would feel differently. That happens to not be my cup of tea, but in any case there's the AGPL, as another commentor points out. And for yet other situations, there's LGPL.
If it was GPL licensed, do you think Google would bother to use it? Or would they write their own instead? Would we even know about osxfuse then?
MIT/BSD is amazing on bootstrap phase, when getting code used and building user base is top priority. Monetization always comes later. Using GPL from the start might just turn your first users away and you might never manage to get critical mass of users to be able to monetize product at all.
In this particular case we don't know if there were any other previous attempts at financing it, like have maintainer contacted Google to provide consulting services? Or provide enterprise support to other parties? etc.
MIT/BSD is turning open source software, in to open source dev tools and libraries, no longer is should the end user software be free and open, no just the tools, frameworks, languages, and libraries used to create the end user software
I would not call this trend "amazing"
(I've licensed my own FOSS kext code as LGPL - either way, the copyleft aspect wouldn't affect any userland code using the kext as it'd be running in a different process. And AGPL doesn't change anything in this context either as far as I'm aware as its additional provisions are only relevant for code running on systems not under the user's control, and again if you're not linking against it, your code isn't a derived work.)
The author is, of course, completely within their rights to stop publishing the source code of their software, but this is a real pity.
The way to go would be for members of the FOSS community to fork the last version of the source code that was published and continue development, but I don't know who (if anyone) will step up and take responsibility.
This also leads to fragmentation, were now you have two popular forks of the same thing which may not be compatible with each other. Sigh.
It's far more likely there will no future well maintained OSS forks, he'll continue developing it as a closed-source product, allowing end-users to install it for free but any company who wants access to his future source code and improvements can compensate him for it. This is a far better outcome than it turning it into abandonware where that will stop working in future macOS versions.
> software won't be available for public scrutiny.
It's a popular cliche to think all OSS projects have healthy development communities and many eyes pouring over it, but as he's the only person contributing fixes, the only way the product was going to improve is if he spends more time working on it which is more likely to happen if he can get sponsored to continue working on it.
None of your fears are likely to come to pass and the health of the project would be far worse off if he abandoned it.
[1] https://github.com/osxfuse/osxfuse/graphs/contributors
2. When it comes to FOSS encryption software, it is important that it's audited every-so-often. Relying on closed-source frameworks makes that impossible. All FOSS software may not be scrutinized, but it's a definite advantage that it can be, when the need arises.
[1] Google presumably audited it when they used a fork.
Do you remember the shareware days? Installing something you wanted meant getting a bunch of browser toolbars etc.
The potential for forking is also powerful.
Props to the OS Xfuse maintainer, he does deserve a fat payout so begrudging him. Still, it paints the clear picture of how BSD is an inferior license when it comes to freedom for users.
Maybe this comment is too slashdot 2006 era, but still, licenses matter.
Google then released their implementation under the BSD. It was forked and worked on, and eventually it now comes to the maintainer. Had GPL been used at any point the current maintainer would not own full copyright and thus not have legal grounds to distribute binaries without source.
Original authors can only unilaterally change licenses if they were the sole authors, or with agreement of all other authors. Or with copyright assignment contracts as you see in GNU projects.
My comment is also not about the maintainer. My comment is about how BSD as a license is often framed as an equivalent choice to GPL or other copyleft licenses.
Years ago this was a topic hackers cared a lot about. Not so much anymore I imagine, but there was indeed a time when hackers cared if their software was open source/copyleft or BSD. Most of the online chatter was hypothetical, today it is practical.
Are they really? But they're clearly not the same. Both are "open" licenses, but one is permissive, and the other is strong copyleft. The intentions behind them are quite different, and I don't see how anyone could read them and not understand this.
Still, I don't appreciate the aspersions I see being cast in this thread towards application of the BSD license. When I release OSS, I prefer to do so under MIT license - because I just want to put it out there for people to use, should it prove useful to them. I don't expect anything in return for it, nor do I wish to place restrictions on its use. Why should I be crucified for selecting a license that accurately reflects my intentions?
You assume that the author would have continued working on it if the code was GPLed. If you look at the list of contributors, you'll notice there's only 4 people (besides him) who have contributed any code [1]. That means that had he not continued working on it, the project would have died long ago. GPL doesn't somehow make code write itself. Unless there are incentives for programmers, all projects can perish regardless of what license they use.
In this case, you could also argue that the sole reason why OSXFuse still exists and is being updated is because it's BSD and the author continued releasing it because it was a binary-only release.
[1] https://github.com/osxfuse/osxfuse/graphs/contributors
He's been the sole maintainer on the project since 2012 [1] and has never been compensated for it, he says it will always be free to end users but wants companies that are financially benefiting from it to help sponsor continued development [2]:
> I will never ask end users for financial support. FUSE will always be free. However, what I'm asking for is for companies, that are selling FUSE-based products or rebrand FUSE and bundle it with their apps, to re-invest some of the profits in the continued development of FUSE on macOS, if they can afford it. I don't think that is unreasonable.
So he's just exercising the same BSD rights that all the other companies who have been taking and commercializing his work and not contributing back any fixes or funding for continued development.
Given that the alternative was to abandon the project [3], the only way it was going to see continued development as an OSS project was is if others took over maintenance/development of it, which anyone is free to do by creating and maintaining a fork.
[1] https://github.com/osxfuse/osxfuse/graphs/contributors
[2] https://github.com/osxfuse/osxfuse/issues/590#issuecomment-5...
[3] https://github.com/osxfuse/osxfuse/issues/590#issuecomment-5...
That can be messy for projects with many past maintainers where the licence options at the time of individual contributions did not explicitly allow this or arbitrary relicensing, but in this case (single current maintainer, other contributions made under a licence that allows him to do this) it needn't be.
Can you un-GPL your work for a single entity? Doesn't that mean that you yourself are violating the GPL? I'm legitimately asking, not being rhetorical.
But you can say, hey, I'm ALSO releasing this code under a separate commercial license that costs $X dollars to get.
You can't infringe on your own copyright!
Alternatively, he totally could have gone and dual-licensed GPL and a permissive commercial license as a monetization strategy, like the author pointed out.
So no, GPL would have changed nothing. Companies would still have been able to ship it unmodified for free without contributing anything.
They could have kept their own code that uses FUSE secret, but even if they had had to release that code, that code is often useless to anyone else. It would not have helped or supported the author of the original code in any way whatsoever.
If they had linked against FUSE they’d need to provide code.
That way companies or other projects that won't touch *GPL for whatever reason have an option that allows them to use the code while helping the project.
Of course this could make the code incompatible with other open licence (or the licensing policies of some larger projects) so isn't a perfect solution. I'm not sure a perfect solution exists when the project maintainer(s) need income to be able to justify the time to continue their work and have not found some other form of sponsorship.
There are some FOSS business models. Sometimes they work. Sometimes they don't. Overall there's more FOSS than ever before, it's an amazingly successful concept. It doesn't always work, some projects and companies fail or decide to stop being FOSS. That doesn't change the fact that it's an amazingly successful concept.
As an anti-capitalist movement/dream, open source has utterly failed. As a concept that has provided lots of opportunities for developers and startups it has been a great success.
Which ones? The two flagship ones I can think of for GPL, Linux and GCC, don’t really have one company in control of them. And on the flip side LLVM and the browser engines, which are arguably under reasonably strong control of one or two companies, are usually Apache or similar.
The GNU created the GPL and licensed most of their software under it. I can't think of an organization less interested in capitalism. Rather the opposite because the viral nature of the license.
Linus picked the GPL to be less commercial/restrictive than the Minix source code.
You can sell GPL software!
All BSD/MIT does is allow it to end up tivoized and remove power from the user. GPL is freedom for the user. BSD is freedom for the dev. Not all users are devs, but all devs are users. Users should take precedence.
Users won't have any power if they don't have software to use. It just happens that BSD (or similar) licenses are easier to deal with when developing things.
I really like RedHat for this reason. It shows that it is the service and support, and the act of maintaining software, that makes it's money, and their books are open so you can see exactly how it works. A comparable startup/project probably won't get VC'd into a unicorn, but there is plenty of room for growth in the GPL software for sale along with service and support category.
Really the only thing that might work is if there was broad community acceptance of not changing all the lower parts of the software stack all the time so the maintenance burden is lower.
Honestly; if we were interested in what was good for FOSS all that needs to happen is that hardware stops improving all the time. Then everyone can calm down, declare things finished and move on without requirements changing. The Linux graphic system (c.f. Xorg v. Wayland) still hasn't finished adjusting to graphics cards. That sort of change is bad for FOSS.
In a sense, this sort of thing is what is being showcased here. The breaking changes to FUSE are probably going to be linked to design changes in Catalina triggered by RAM/CPU/Network changes and the RPM/SSD transition that has been going on for however long. When that sort of thing subsides in 50 years there is going to be this amazing FOSS renaissance as working things stop breaking because of hardware changes and the balance really tilts towards free & available software.
Here's my "get off my lawn" perspective: those developers who remember a world where there was little or no free software (from, say, the mid-1980's, when Sun made the C compiler a for-cost option on SunOS through until commercial Linux distributions), have a visceral understanding of free software that those who came to it later, and (perhaps understandably) take it for granted, don't have.
Free software is a commons. In a healthy community, people pitch in to help, and maintainers become overwhelmed by the scale of activity, not because they've been left alone to support many users by themselves for years.
There are some efforts to address it (eg. SSL, Mongo, etc), but they're the first "drafts" if you like.
When a majority of the users of free software were programmers themselves, things were quite different to today. The world has changed, but the free software model has not kept pace.
With hindsight, I think the "Open Source" definition can be seen as a turning point, and the issues we have today stem from the decisions to give everyone the use of free software, even those who aren't of the community, or able to contribute in turn.
I don't think that was a bad or wrong decision, but I think that the ramifications are still playing out.
It's entirely because many of these projects are run by professional software developers, not professional managers. So many projects with single maintainers are that way because the maintainer feels a sense of ownership rather than a sense of stewardship.
It's not to say that solo maintainers are bad people; just that the jobs of writing software and coordinating software development require different, non-overlapping skill sets.
If you are going to mention ChromeOS or Android, ChromeOS is hardly a blip outside US school system, and what kernel is being used on Android is irrelevant to user space, there is Fuschia on the horizon and Google has been replacing everything, with the Linux kernel being the last piece of GPL code standing.
Then if you mean embedded, plenty of IoT OS are MIT based and even Linux Foundation now has Zephyr as alternative to Linux, all operating systems where OEM can profit without giving anything back.
If you mean compilers, plenty of embedded OEMs are now happy LLVM users free of contributions, while reducing their development costs.
Compared to what knowledge of how good it could be if we had a more sustainable model than hoping someone has the charity or hobby to work on something we need for free?
This reminds me of when gamers assert how game modding has done fine so far limited to just labors of love and weekend hobbyism. Though I'm sure gamers are more coming from an angle of not wanting to pay for anything, we can only imagine the gaming mods we'd have if we had more of a culture around allowing people to work full-time on things we enjoy instead of only waiting for the few hobbyists with the masochism or compulsion to do it.
SOME of it is, sure. The big successful projects.
But what about the rest of it?
I don't think that's a problem for FOSS, it's a problem (if you call it such) of the economic system that we live under.
Generally the only realistic answer to that for most people at an individual level is to focus on financial security so that you don't have to care about that sort of fluff.
Most people can't. That's how our world works. In the general case creatives earn effectively nothing and only a few blockbuster individuals 'make it', regardless of the field; and usually they have to go proprietary to some extent.
You're definitely right about this for folks who are barely scraping by, working multiple jobs, etc.
But for folks in IT, taking the time to read and comment on HN... we make the time for what we choose to make the time for.
well, going FOSS can be an effective marketing strategy: by making something open and free (in both meanings) you get much higher probability of that something becoming popular. That in turn gives a lot new opportunities to sell complementary something or other something. This is best case scenario though, and you need to have resources/other sources of income for the time it needs to get widely adopted and popular (or the very possibility that it will not happen at all)
Right, and then people try to do that, fail to sell whatever it is that they thought they would, and end up putting some sort of annoyance on the code to punish those who are using it.
If FOSS zealotry wasn't a thing, then said expectations would be unreasonable. Sadly we live in a world where many people can withstand the cognitive dissonance of "You should use FOSS" and "You shouldn't complain about it because it is free".
Second, despite not having to contribute, license while, LLVM has still seen so much contribution from big companies (Apple for one) that the whole argument is moot.
Third, I meant companies like RedHat, or projects like Mongo, MySQL and others -- far more successful money-wise than most niche commercial compilers the kind that you appear to be a fan of while deriding FOSS for not making money...
Hardly something that most LLVM FOSS contributors not on university research budgets can enjoy.
So something like what happened here is not even possible. If the FUSE project on OSX would have been GPL from the beginning this person would not be able to change the licensing since he originally forked it, unless he rewrote all of the GPL code in a clean room rewrite which is not really realistic
I don't think you can legally distribute GPL kernel modules for non GPL kernels. Even if you linked the module to the Darwin code, which is released under an OSS license (APSL), the two are not compatible and it's not clear if redistribution is fine (see "Darling: macOS compatibility for Linux")
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#FreeBSD
MacOS XNU doesn't.
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#apsl2
Another example would be the closed source VMWare ESX, which is definitely not GPL-compatible.
In fact VMWare and FSF/SFC have been fighting over it for the past 10 years.
Even though the court dismissed the claim, VMWare announced that will remove the code in question (https://www.vmware.com/company/news/updates/march-2019-hellw...)
You can read more about it here
https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/03/09/0423243/vmware-tou...
In fact VMWare realese the source code of their drivers (among the other things) because they are licensed under the GPL
https://www.vmware.com/download/open_source.html
And maintains the repositories on Github with much of the GPL code they use
https://github.com/vmware
They disagreed that vmkernel is a driver, they did not rule that GPLv2 software can be combined with incompatible licenses.
The source code for vmklinux, The actual kernel module, is released by VMWare for this exact reason.
I know a lot of FOSS contributors but have never met one IRL that seriously believes there is money in it. Outside of people on internet platforms (that by and large aren't to be taken seriously to begin with), have you encountered real zealots like this? I doubt that they exist in truly great numbers.
Honestly, the only model that seems to work in the long-term is corporate-backed OSS where maintainers are paid a salary. Professionalism endures long after the passion has faded.
But, big picture, yes a lot of OSS projects have the same issue. Funding is clearly one aspect, but another aspect is also to work on having less "single person projects" (and I'm not talking about one time PRs but a genuine second core developer). I'm not sure how to encourage that however, maybe more commonly adding "HELP WANTED!" in the project README, maybe a button "I want to become a permanent contributor of <PROJECT>" button in Github, I don't know. If you are alone on a project, even if funded, chances are you will loss interest after a while, leaving the project with tons of possible improvements not realized, and a on/off maintenance, having more "N>1 core developers projects" would help mitigate that.
On the other hand, since this is OSS, if an organization does need N>1 badly enough, then they can commit their own resources to it, forking if necessary.
You have to give people something of value, even if nominal value, to actually get corporate interest and to drive the kind of ROI that makes it viable to continue spending so much dang time on these projects. And a lot of people pfft at that and wave their hands about their right to other people's free time (or that an invisible hand will Make Things Work should those people choose to spend their free time in other ways, ignoring that that usually just means other people get to burn out instead). The only sustainable way to build open-source software is to get businesses to pay for it. And that's why we're where we are with these conversations: it's not the end-user free riders who matter, it's the commercial ones.
(I don't think the Redis license is the right approach, FWIW. I think there are better ones. Happy to chat offline with folks who have a similar interest in this space; email's in my profile.)
Most companies won't touch AGPL and will be very happy to pay for the commercial licence.
The project page on github mentions two sponsors though, Boxcryptor and Editshare. I don´t know any of the story behind this though, just tought I should mention it.
I have to object to that. I work for a company which pays him to build branded versions of FUSE for macOS, and has been doing so for several years.
He does reliably ship us new builds, but it has sometimes been a little difficult to get him to respond to feature requests or even patches that we send him.
I don't believe that he is scaling much better with his commercial licensing than he was as a FLOSS maintainer.
As it is, we're fairly happy with his work to continue to support new versions of macOS, which is fairly hard to ship systems software on these days (the code signing and notarization requirements keep getting more and more onerous, system integrity protection keeps getting in the way of debugging, and so on), but it would be nice if we weren't limited to a single person working on the project.
I'd really rather he kept the project open source, and continued to provide custom builds for companies on a contract basis. Due to the difficulties of building and signing the kernel extension across all of the versions of macOS that it supports, just having the source available but keeping the binaries under a proprietary license would probably be sufficient to make it worth the while of most companies to license with him to provide custom builds like we do.
I hope we see more of this in the future: developers realising that the work they do has value and that they’re not required to spend their lives giving it away for free. So they take control of their work product and start capturing some of that value for themselves.
It’s a shame that the article is written in this tone, as it mirrors the dominant sentiment among open source folks. There is still a lot of entitlement to be seen, even here in the comments from people who are likely to end up in the same boat as the software author referenced in the article.
I think it’ll take a while to get there.
The article seemed pretty neutral excluding the slightly shady stuff like not mentioning the license change properly, timely or even in expected locations
> the dominant sentiment among open source folks
The dominant sentiment of open source folks is that they want open source instead of proprietary software? That seems expected, it’s after all the whole point.
edit: positive -> neutral; shady -> slightly shady
And if you admit to the existence of donations, then do you admit that you were wrong to say "open source folks don't want to pay for anything"?
Which in any case only a tiny part of kernel contributors can live from.
Is that a roundabout way of admitting that you're wrong and open source can be sustainable?
Similarly, your claim that "open source folks" don't value open source software as worth paying for is straightforwardly false, regardless of whether they pay out of their personal bank accounts or push their Fortune 500 employers to donate money and time (which every Fortune 500 calculates in terms of money).
Most devs though would balk at the idea of paying for Linux.
Balk? You think the MBAs at those big corporations are pushing them to pay for Linux over the objections of the devs? No, devs don't balk, devs are the reason those companies are paying for Linux.
What in the world do any of your points have to do with the discussion at hand? My parent, pjmlp, claimed that (1) open source can't be sustainable because (2) open source supporters don't value open source work as being worth paying for, both of which are contradicted by the incontrovertible facts that (1) sustainable open source projects exist and (2) they're sustainable because of open source supporters who pay for it. Corporate supporters, yes, but corporations are composed of people, and corporate supporters of open source are only that way because their "open source folk".
- Of those which are, such as Linux, they are sustainable not because community cares about them (they might or might not) or because community pays for them (they might or might not), but because corporations find enough vested in them to support them (through money and/or people). I highly doubt Linux Foundation is sustainable without corporate sponsors.
- If you ask a typical dev to pay for a Linux distribution, they will balk at it. A one-off donation? Maybe. And that's Linux, a major and a clearly expensive project. How many projects are there that we take for granted? How many of them are sustained by the oh-so-great-and-generous open source community? Dozens? Less?
There's a very clear division:
- Strategic projects with vested interests get picked up my huge corporations (or started by them).
- A few lucky projects get enough traction to be able to live off donations whole working on them full time.
- The absolute vast majority of all the rest can and do survive only because devs can afford to work on them. As soon as they can't, good bye development and support.
Edit: fixing some autocorrect mistakes.
Or maybe you are trying to disagree with me, in the self-contradictory sentence in which you state that projects like Linux are not sustainable because community cares about them, but because community members find enough vested in them to support them. What's the difference between "care about" and "vested in and support"?
Or, for some reason, you and pjmlp don't consider people who work at corporations to be "community members". Turns out if you exclude most of the people who are paid to work on open source, then you find that there's no money being put into open source!
Look, I'm sorry to be snarky, but it's frustrating to be told facts that don't contradict nor add to what I've been saying, and that I'm already all too aware of. I don't know what point you're trying to make.
If you're just trying to point out that many important open source projects can't get corporate backing to become sustainable, again, I already know that from painful personal experience, but in the case of osxfuse it actually seems like it is in a position to get Google to pay up, and in any case the problem of sustainability in open source is squarely not the open source community's fault like pjmlp implied. That's been my point the whole time. I don't know what yours is.
I'm not saying it's easy, just that it's not impossible.
And I bet only a lucky few of the contributors get to see the money.
18 years ago, since then it's been open source and paid for by donations
>and has some big studios doing those donations
These big studios started donating this past year when the development fund was started (and really took off during the latter part of this year for some reason), before that it was donations and in later years also the Blender Cloud service.
>And I bet only a lucky few of the contributors get to see the money.
Well, most (if not all) of the Blender developers now working full time where Blender contributors, also Blender is a non-profit organization.
OSS has killed indie development, for the benefit of large corporations. Thousands of developers out there are putting in their own sweat blood and tears in advancing "humanity" by building great OSS products, only to be taken advantage of. Seal the pipe. Charge money for great work!
As far as I understand he is still giving it away for free to users, but not allowing other companies to sell his work to for their profit only.
There is. Ditch Apple and use sane systems without some control obsessive entities constantly hovering over you and dictating you how to (or not to) use them.
Developers abandoning Apple should be the taste of their own medicine for them.
I don't know if that is true, but if it is, then that is a certainly due to Apple policies.
It's also interesting to contrast with Linux FUSE, which to my knowledge has never been associated with any maintainer drama.
Mr Fleischer has done a huge amount of unpaid work so a narrow segment of wealthy software workers can avoid the choice between paying for proprietary software and supporting Free Software, after spending thousands of dollars on a MacOS system
No world has ever produced a violin small enough to play an elegy for those “victims.”
If you wanted a Free Software FUSE, maybe a Linux desktop would have been a better choice?
Instead it seems more like the heart of your comment is that you view everything in terms of an ideological battle between the Free Software movement and everyone else. So when you came upon an article and HN thread calmly discussing a maintainer's decision to change their project's license for understandable reasons but in a somewhat underhanded way, you immediately sorted everyone into heroes and villains and self-righteously took a stand.
And when you proclaim that this person "views everything in terms of an ideological battle between the Free Software movement and everyone else", would you say that's a more nuanced and balanced take on the matter?
By contrast, "free riders", "huge amount of unpaid work [for] wealthy software workers", "No world has ever produced a violin small enough to play an elegy for those “victims.”"—I don't think I addressed my parent in remotely approaching that much disdain.
> after spending thousands of dollars on a MacOS system
Note how much the developer also pays in hardware and in subscriptions like the Apple Developer account.
Apple does not give free certificates for open source projects. Everybody must pay!
If someone wants to try, having a generic link between FUSE and File Providers in iOS will be a great addition. You could make a generic application that interoperates various FUSE projects against the File Provider API in iOS, so you could mount all sort of crazy stuff in iOS Files application.
[0]: https://github.com/captn3m0/ideas/blob/master/opds-ios-file-...
I think everything done here seems legal, because BSD licensing pretty much allows for this (I am not a lawyer though, and I haven't examined how things were with third-party contributions for example).
Morally, the only fault I can say on the maintainer's behavior is a lack of transparency. This kind of decisive move ideally should be accompanied by an equally decisive communication effort. Trying to do this "quietly" isn't an option when a big number of users and/or big players are involved (as it seems Google is involved to some extent).
Totally agree with that. The maintainer seems to have made very little effort to get compensated for his work. It would surely be nice if some company stepped-up and offered to sponsor the development of the project. But it's also kind of childish to scheme and hold grudges for not getting something you never bothered asking for.
Other open-source developers have been in a similar position in the past, but the handling of the situation was much more transparent and considerate. Off the top of my head, I can remember the example of Synergy [1]. When the developer needed support, he announced well in advance the changes to the model of development. And actually put the time to spin-up a company around the project, and offer ways for normal users to support development.
[1] https://symless.com/synergy
When you state that he never bothered asking for something, what are you basing that on?
it's a pity, it's a shame that companies who use FOSS benefit, but do not understand (or do, but ignore) the idea of FOSS, which is to give back to community. this also includes other FOSS companies, etc as everyone uses openssl, zlib and sqlite.
to base a project on FOSS requires that you contribute back. or pay back if you can. and when your business makes 1000$ then 1$ out of every 1000$ for the FOSS guy that made it possible is money worth spending, isn't it?
if it's true that VeraCrypt, the G company and others based work on this developer's efforts and forgot, for decade, to give back anything, well - it's well deserved to leave them staring at the blank repo. well deserved indeed, as they had plenty of time and resource to compensate the author while reaping benefits off his work. well done to choose the BSD license in this case.
all other companies building big-software based on hundreds opensource projects should rethink their strategies.
there is no free lunch, someone pays for it. and its a shame, when this someone is left alone to pay for his lunch, while hundreds benefit from it. maybe there should be the FOSS Church and at least make these people revered as saints.
If a developer works on a project and wants commercial companies to give back then they can choose a suitable licence such as GPLv3; if they just want to get their code out there and don't really mind how it's used then BSD is more suitable.
No, it absolutely does not. If that was a requirement, it should say so in the license.
If you don't want your work to be publicly usable by people who don't contribute, don't open source it.
And contributing back is not as easy as lobbing code over the wall, you have to spend a lot of time and energy coming to agreements on what makes sense to share and how to organize it. It would probably be a full time job for Mr Benjamin to vet external contributions even if everyone could agree that all were desirable.
Yep, he's allowed to do this and people basically have to suck it up.
This couldn't have happened if the code was GPL-licensed.
This might be a good occasion take a moment to think about all the BSD-licensed software you're currently using, and imagine it disappearing just like this piece of software. Then go back to your repository and re-license as much as you can as GPLv3.
As the copyright holder of the code he could re-license it the same way even if it was GPL.
1. There are github commits not by him in the project.
2. There are lots of copyright assertions scattered through the project. The first one I ran into was:
> Copyright (c) 2006-2008 Amit Singh/Google Inc.
but I'm sure there are way more than that.
Nobody can relicence the code that's under your copyright without your permission.
There is: offer the maintainer a decent (probably part-time) wage for working on this while keeping it open source.
This isn't just commercial interests: this is private individuals too. Welcome to the idealism of F/OSS rubbing up against less altruistic parts of human nature.
While I'm judging others I'll have to hold my hands up and say that, while I have helped out some projects in the past via both bug-fix contributions and small financial ones, and having opened some of my projects in the dim & distant past, I don't think I can claim to be a net contributor by any wider measure.
If you use software that is dependent on osxfuse....send an email to your sales contact and let them know that they need to contribute back to the community.
> Now this may come as a shock to some of you, but Apple really doesn’t seem to like it when third party developers change just about anything about their UX
> Deploying a kext requires it be signed using a special Kernel Extension Signing Certificate, which can only be acquired from Apple
this restriction has nothing to do with them not liking people doing stuff about their UX and everything to do about the fact that kernel extensions bypass all security boundaries between users and processes.
Kernel extensions are bloody dangerous and I'm happy with Apple putting additional scrutiny on them.
"But is it allowed for customers to choose to buy this?".
"allowed" is irrelevant here.
This will turn off all the security features that have been added over the years, including the “Catalina Vista” prompts people were complaining about in September.
The reason this requires booting from the recovery partition is to make it impossible for malware to flip the switch and to make it convoluted enough that even the most gullible of users will question their actions when pushed to do these steps by malware.
(Apple has stated publicly and in very clear language that they fully intend for the Mac to continue to be able to run unsigned code, so I believe this toggle isn’t temporary)
I installed it back in June, so my memory might be a bit hazy, but as far as I’m aware SIP doesn’t control TCC.
Then you can do with your machine whatever you want.
One the one hand, it makes it difficult for regular users to install malicious root-kits, but it also limits all wide scale adoption of FOSS tech like this at the pure whims and discretion of Apple.