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FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

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Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#21

Post by Epskampie »

vosper wrote: post #10
Epskampie wrote: post #3

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.

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.

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#22

Post by oefrha »

dmitriid wrote: post #9
ixtli wrote: post #2

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 say…

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. See "Software below poverty line": https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html

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.

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#23

Post by hizanberg »

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.

[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...

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#24

Post by stouset »

rahuldottech wrote: post #15

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 versi…

VeraCrypt is for Windows. This is a FUSE implementation for macOS.

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#25

Post by IfOnlyYouKnew »

ixtli wrote: post #2

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 say…

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.

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#26

Post by mike_d »

khc wrote: post #17
mike_d wrote: post #13

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.

the footnote doesn't say that's the reason osxfuse went close source

You can easily infer it if you read the whole article.

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#27

Post by kibwen »

rahuldottech wrote: post #20
Danieru wrote: post #18

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?)

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#28

Post by lars_francke »

stouset wrote: post #24
rahuldottech wrote: post #15

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 versi…

VeraCrypt is for Windows. This is a FUSE implementation for macOS.

VeraCrypt is not limited to Windows, v it runs fine on macOS

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#29

Post by Danieru »

rahuldottech wrote: post #20
Danieru wrote: post #18

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?

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.

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#30

Post by oefrha »

Epskampie wrote: post #21
vosper wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

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.
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