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Local Stack Archived their GitHub repo and requires an account to run

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Re: Local Stack Archived their GitHub repo and requires an account to run

#31

Post by thayne »

armchairhacker wrote: post #21
tecleandor wrote: post #11

They still have linked their OpenCollective account, where they have raised $10K and still have a balance of $5K. [0] It's not a lot in the great scheme of things, but, have they been using a platform that's seemingly built for communities and open source to bootstrap their business? Because this is not a 'open core' situation. They just closed the repo and ran away. If they had that idea all along, I feel like it ha…

“Open core” is when part of the product is open-source and part is private. Was a significant part of the product private before this announcement? If not, someone can fork the repo and immediately launch a competitor (FOSS or paid). (Technically even if so, except it wouldn’t be immediate, and if they’d have to re-implement too much, it would be easier to start from scratch.)

Yes there were significant portions that were proprietary before this, including support for some services.

The parts that were open source might still be worth forking, but you would probably need to change every occurrence of the name to avoid trademark issues.

Re: Local Stack Archived their GitHub repo and requires an account to run

#32

Post by inglor »

First minio and then localstack, as an open source maintainer I find that abandoning their community is bad faith. I totally get wanting to monetize but removing the free product entirely feels like such a betrayel.

Luckily, I've been vibing with Devin since this started having it build a cleanbox emulator on top of real s3 tuned for my specific use case. It's a lot less general but it's much faster and easy to add the sort of assertions I need in it. It's no localstack but for my limited use case it works.

Re: Local Stack Archived their GitHub repo and requires an account to run

#33

Post by imiric »

hungryhobbit wrote: post #27
tecleandor wrote: post #11

They still have linked their OpenCollective account, where they have raised $10K and still have a balance of $5K. [0] It's not a lot in the great scheme of things, but, have they been using a platform that's seemingly built for communities and open source to bootstrap their business? Because this is not a 'open core' situation. They just closed the repo and ran away. If they had that idea all along, I feel like it ha…

Wait, so a company shared their work with the public for however long, then decided to leave what was shared up ... but stop sharing ... and you're upset?!? They did everything properly by the rules of OSS, decided it wasn't in their best interest to keep doing OSS, and left all their code available, as required by OSS. They were a textbook good participant. Meanwhile, 99% of companies never open source anything: why…

How can people still not understand that OSS can be abused?

It doesn't matter that the previous code is still available. Nobody can technically delete it from the internet, so that's hardly something they did "right".

The original maintainers are gone, and users will have to rely on someone else to pick up the work, or maintain it themselves. All of this creates friction, and fragments the community.

And are you not familiar with the concept of OSS rugpulls? It's when a company uses OSS as a marketing tool, and when they deem it's not profitable enough, they start cutting corners, prioritizing their commercial product, or, as in this case, shut down the OSS project altogether. None of this is being a "textbook good participant".

> Meanwhile, 99% of companies never open source anything: why aren't you complaining about how "unethical" they are?

Frankly, there are many companies with proprietary products that behave more ethically and have more respect for their users than this. The fact that a project is released as OSS doesn't make it inherently better. Seeing OSS as a "free gift" is a terrible way of looking at it.

Re: Local Stack Archived their GitHub repo and requires an account to run

#34

Post by etchalon »

hungryhobbit wrote: post #27
tecleandor wrote: post #11

They still have linked their OpenCollective account, where they have raised $10K and still have a balance of $5K. [0] It's not a lot in the great scheme of things, but, have they been using a platform that's seemingly built for communities and open source to bootstrap their business? Because this is not a 'open core' situation. They just closed the repo and ran away. If they had that idea all along, I feel like it ha…

Wait, so a company shared their work with the public for however long, then decided to leave what was shared up ... but stop sharing ... and you're upset?!? They did everything properly by the rules of OSS, decided it wasn't in their best interest to keep doing OSS, and left all their code available, as required by OSS. They were a textbook good participant. Meanwhile, 99% of companies never open source anything: why…

Because this thread isn't about those other companies.

Re: Local Stack Archived their GitHub repo and requires an account to run

#35

Post by computomatic »

stanac wrote: post #14
garrettjoecox wrote: post #2

"You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain"

So is local stack dead? Is this situation the lesser evil? Or is it not dead and we will see a villain rise? Edit: I see now, they have commercial offerings: https://www.localstack.cloud/pricing I am not sure if my corp will be willing to pay or tell us to find something else, but I use it everyday, our integration tests depend on local stack.

IMO, the trajectory was set back when they removed the option for monthly payments. Minimum US$450 to play made it a non-starter for my projects (even with commercial ambitions). They changed this just as I started to integrate (~2024, I think) so I kept to the free capabilities. Have been waiting for the other show to drop and here we are.

Edit: looks like they’ve reintroduced monthly billing within the last few months. I guess that’s a sort of win, even if not for the OSS community. But I’d still be reluctant to get into bed with them at this stage.

Re: Local Stack Archived their GitHub repo and requires an account to run

#36

Post by obsidianbases1 »

There's going to be a lot of complaints about open-source restricting access.

It's going to keep happening because it just doesn't make sense for a lot of previous business models that supported and open-source project, something that was seen recently with tailwind.

In one of my projects, one that remains source-available, I had encountered an "open-source justice warrior" that made it their mission to smear the project because of the switch, grasping at straws to do everything they could to paint my intentions as malicious.

It's really too bad, and will only hurt the availability of free alternatives if one cannot provide the source under a "just don't commercially compete with the paid version of the product" license without getting branded as a scamming cash grabber

Re: Local Stack Archived their GitHub repo and requires an account to run

#37

Post by henriks »

atls wrote: post #17
matt_callmann wrote: post #4

What are the alternatives? I primarily used it for S3 and SQS emulation.

It's not a complete replacement, but if you're in a Python ecosystem, you might find Moto to be of interest. https://github.com/getmoto/moto

at least some parts of localstack seemed to be built on moto, based on a brief look at some point

Re: Local Stack Archived their GitHub repo and requires an account to run

#38

Post by inetknght »

imiric wrote: post #33
hungryhobbit wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, so a company shared their work with the public for however long, then decided to leave what was shared up ... but stop sharing ... and you're upset?!? They did everything properly by the rules of OSS, decided it wasn't in their best interest to keep doing OSS, and left all their code available, as required by OSS. They were a textbook good participant. Meanwhile, 99% of companies never open source anything: why…

How can people still not understand that OSS can be abused? It doesn't matter that the previous code is still available. Nobody can technically delete it from the internet, so that's hardly something they did "right". The original maintainers are gone, and users will have to rely on someone else to pick up the work, or maintain it themselves. All of this creates friction, and fragments the community. And are you not…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

You might want to get your arguments in order. In one sentence you're calling OSS rugpulls a problem, and then in another you're claiming that proprietary products behave more ethically.

So which is it? Is it less-ethical to have provided software as open source, and then later become a proprietary product? Why? I see having source code, even for an old/unmaintained product be strictly superior to having never provided the source code no matter how much "respect" the company has for their users today.

Re: Local Stack Archived their GitHub repo and requires an account to run

#39

Post by cyanydeez »

redwood wrote: post #16
iaaan wrote: post #6

I evangelized localstack at my company a while back, but as we integrated it deeper into our CI test runs we started running into more and more things they don't support, and it feels impossible to get any attention from their support/devs despite being paying customers. Their Cloud Pod and ephemeral instance features in particular feel pretty half-baked and not very useful at the moment. Fun tangent: it's pretty eas…

I too was excited about the idea originally but then started realizing that they will have an increasingly untenable service area to try and maintain and mimic and it was just never going to work out.

It does seem like LLMs might make that a real proposition; of course, after these commercial enterprises steal copyright, copyleft and open source code, and the tooling gets good enough to download their cars, a new legion of DMCA lawyers and lobbies will be unleashed.

Prep yourself though for that napster bloom, it'll be here shortly.

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