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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

#231

Post by MayeulC »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #188

That was a very good write-up. Quite fair, and Kool-Aid-free. It is a pretty good synopsis of the issues faced by open-source developers, these days. Much like The September That Never Ended was probably the best thing that ever happened to the Internet, but was really tough on the folks already there, the adoption of open-source systems by commercial entities is making open-source "sexy." Open-source developers (of…

I'm starting to feel that September is slowing and it might end at some point, that in the end it really is related to the technology adoption life cycle[1].

If you look at the bell curve on that page, its integral is the technology penetration, that is a sigmoid: start slowly (initial period), accelerate (eternal september) for a while, and start to decrease the penetration speed. At some point, enough people will likely have knowledge about the technology that new entrants will take much less time for those already in to bring up.

You can argue that those that enter the field now are adopting GAFAM rather than OSS alternatives, but I think that as long as you have the "eternal september" feeling, it means that a lot of people are jumping in, and will in turn help the upbringing of others later in the cycle.

Hopefully FOSS culture and knowledge will become endemic in companies at some point; that's all I'm saying. But it's hard, at any point of the curve, to predict where we are in that cycle, and when it will end.

I'd be curious to see some data on say, the number of Facebook users. I'm pretty sure it can be seen as a sigmoid.

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#232

Post by matkoniecz »

dangus wrote: post #221

> He can do that? > Uh… probably? As I mentioned, most of the code is under BSD-style licenses. The command line utility to actually mount the damn thing is under the Apple Public Source License, which has a “soft copyleft.” But in theory, if no further changes are made to this part of the code, it already meets the requirements for source code distribution. Just a note here, my understanding of the legal status of s…

> As the nearly-sole contributor, the author can violate his own license for the code he created.

To be more specific, it is not in a violation of copyright. I am pretty sure that when I publish my code under any standard* licence it is not an exclusive license.

I can still sell access on a more business friendly licence, publish it under CC0 and so on.

*is there even serious licence that includes "no dual licencing" exclusivity clause that is binding the author? Is it even possible to do as a licence?

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#233

Post by upofadown »

The article makes this out to be more complicated than it is. Apple makes it very difficult to use 3rd party kernel modules. That is the whole thing.

The open source thing is a complete red herring for everyone except the current maintainer who just happened to use some code that might be open source in a different context. The source for the module that could end up in the Apple kernel was never open to begin with. No one else could actually use the result of compiling the code. So the source was not ever open in a way that made any practical difference.

The only moral here is that it is sometimes possible to prevent the use of open source code in some contexts and that Apple sometimes does. We already knew that.

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#234

Post by chinesempire »

syshum wrote: post #163
pjmlp wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 w…

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")

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#235

Post by pilif »

adrianN wrote: post #127
pilif wrote: post #116

Nitpick: > 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…

Forbidding users from doing dangerous stuff with the machines they own is not good imho.

You can disable all of those checks by booting from the recovery partition, opening the Terminal and use `csrutil disable`.

Then you can do with your machine whatever you want.

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#236

Post by richardwhiuk »

eps wrote: post #74
saagarjha wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> G and other companies don't contribute back to the project in any form Amit Singh literally created the project while at Google.

Fantastic, but is this meant to somehow give Google a solid excuse for not contributing back to a 3rd party fork they ended up using?

It's not clear to me that they are using the third party fork

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#237

Post by [deleted] »

hizanberg wrote: post #23

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 w…

[deleted]

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#238

Post by simias »

tssva wrote: post #229
simias wrote: post #201

I agree that any aggressive towards the maintainer is unwarranted, even if I personally disagree with his move. In particular this comment quoted in TFA amused me: >Then drop it and let someone else maintain it. I want to reply to this person: then fork the last open source version and maintain that. That's the whole point really. Besides he apparently made the change two years ago and people only start noticing now,…

There are two possible scenarios: The developer always thought that contributing back code or financial support should be a requirement of use but failed to reflect this in the license chosen and now is correcting this. The developer over time has changed their believe of what the requirements for use should or need to be. This change of thought may have been informed by the behavior of those using the code but is st…

In my system of value (which is of course subjective and you may not share) I do consider that these open source projects suffer a sort of tragedy of the commons where some companies benefit immensely from them (think how expensive it would be to build and maintain something like osxfuse from scratch) but don't contribute anything back to it. It's like big corporations managing to pay little to no taxes in the countries they do most of they business, is it illegal? Probably not in most cases. Still unethical in my personal opinion.

But instead of just complaining about it I could try to be more productive and offer an alternative. Maybe there could be a nonprofit dedicated to centralizing these donations and redistributing them, for instance by polling the donors to figure out what they use and then split the cake based on the results. I'm sure in many situations it's not so much that the company doesn't want to give anything bad, it's just that they can't be bothered or don't know how. I don't know how realistic that would be though.

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#239

Post by wongarsu »

matkoniecz wrote: post #232
dangus wrote: post #221

> He can do that? > Uh… probably? As I mentioned, most of the code is under BSD-style licenses. The command line utility to actually mount the damn thing is under the Apple Public Source License, which has a “soft copyleft.” But in theory, if no further changes are made to this part of the code, it already meets the requirements for source code distribution. Just a note here, my understanding of the legal status of s…

> As the nearly-sole contributor, the author can violate his own license for the code he created. To be more specific, it is not in a violation of copyright. I am pretty sure that when I publish my code under any standard* licence it is not an exclusive license. I can still sell access on a more business friendly licence, publish it under CC0 and so on. *is there even serious licence that includes "no dual licencing"…

> Is it even possible to do as a licence?

I guess you could draft it as some kind of exclusivity licence "this work will only ever be available under this licence". You would still own the copyright, just contractually bound not to exercise it.

But even that wouldn't be very convincing. If the author republishes under another licence this isn't in violation of copyright or any criminal law, it's more like "I gave written agreement not to do something I have the legal right to do, did it anyway, and nobody can demonstrate any damages. Sue me"

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#240

Post by andy098 »

hizanberg wrote: post #23

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 w…

> 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.

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