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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

#41

Post by armchairhacker »

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…

> It doesn't matter that the previous code is still available…The original maintainers are gone, and users will have to rely on someone else to pick up the work, or maintain it themselves.

It does matter: popular products have been forked or the open-source component was reused. E.g. Terraform and OpenTofu, Redis and Redict, Docker and Colima (partly MinIO and RustFS; the latter is a full rewrite, but since the former was FOSS and it’s a “drop-in binary replacement”, I’m sure they looked at the code for reference…)

If your environment doesn’t have API changes and vulnerabilities, forking requires practically zero effort. If it does, the alternative to maintaining yourself or convincing someone to maintain it for you (e.g. with donations), is having the original maintainers keep working for free.

Although this specific product may be mostly closed source (they’ve had commercial addons before the announcement). If so, the problem here is thinking it was open in the first place.

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

#42

Post by gzread »

inglor wrote: post #32

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 t…

It does feel like a betrayal. We live in a world where money is the main thing that matters and it's increasingly hard to come by and you need increasingly more of it (these are all designed policies, not emergent behavior). It makes sense that people don't want to do things for free unless they already have enough money.

Engineers who remained apolitical are now surprised the politics is bad.

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

#43

Post by imiric »

inetknght wrote: post #38
imiric wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You might want to think about my argument a bit more.

> Is it less-ethical to have provided software as open source, and then later become a proprietary product? Why?

Because usually these companies use OSS as a marketing gimmick, not because they believe in it, or want to contribute to a public good. So, yes, this dishonesty is user hostile, and some companies with proprietary products do have more respect for their users. The freedoms provided by free software are a value add on top of essential values that any developer/company should have for the users of their software. OSS projects are not inherently better simply because the code is free to use, share, and modify.

To be fair, I don't think a developer/company should be expected to maintain an OSS project indefinitely. Priorities change, life happens. But being a good OSS steward means making this transition gradually, trying to find a new maintainer, etc., to avoid impacting your existing user base. Archiving the project and demanding payment is the epitome of hostile behavior.

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

#44

Post by drnick1 »

obsidianbases1 wrote: post #36

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 pro…

Source available with various arbitrary restriction is non-free software. What the "open source warriors" take exception to is presenting a project as "open source" or "free" when in reality it is not.

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

#45

Post by jalalx »

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…

So basically businesses should go bankrupt because making money is "unethical"

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

#46

Post by skeledrew »

obsidianbases1 wrote: post #36

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 pro…

A thing cannot be considered free/open source if there are restrictions on what users can do with it. If a maintainer wishes to put a "don't compete commercially" license then it should be clearly labelled as source available, not open source. To do otherwise is to deceive the open source community, which has a particular and well defined understanding of what "open source" entails.

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

#47

Post by tedk-42 »

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…

Open Source Software doesn't mean maintenance free.

The code is all there mate.

Their time and efforts and ongoing contributions to the project are not.

OSS is not about fairness and free work from people. It's just putting the code out there in public.

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

#48

Post by skeledrew »

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…

> a company shared their work with the public for however long, then decided to leave what was shared up

More like a company took advantage of a community that expected their freely offered labor to not be commercialized at any point in time without making available said works in a fully free vector as well, as that's an implicit expectation behind "open source".

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

#49

Post by andrewstuart2 »

obsidianbases1 wrote: post #36

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 pro…

My main complaint about the project changes we've seen lately is that these companies are happy to take all the code that previous contributors have written for free in good faith, and profit off of it without any sharing. The whole reason I and many people have contributed to some of the projects out there is under the premise that I've been given something great/useful for free so I'm going to give back for free. If you want to create a project that's source-available or whatever you want to call it, from the start, you'll probably even get my support.

Sure, it's totally legal for the company to change how they operate in the future. But it burns all that good faith of previous contributions in favor of profit. And so yeah, I hope the companies that pull this crash and burn in proportion to how much free code they accepted from contributors that they now wish to profit from.

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

#50

Post by skeledrew »

inetknght wrote: post #38
imiric wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's a matter of honesty and trust. A company that has never provided source code is more honest and trustworthy than one that provides source code, extracts community labor (by accepting issues and/or PRs) and then makes off with said labor (even if they left a frozen version available) at a future point.
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