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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

#211

Post by m-p-3 »

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,…

> I agree that any aggressive towards the maintainer is unwarranted, even if I personally disagree with his move.

I also agree, being aggressive towards a volunteer maintainer achieves nothing and brings the possibility that he'll simply stops working altogether on it for free, like what happened with wiringPi some time ago.

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#212

Post by dkdkdjdj »

adrianN wrote: post #192
tinus_hn wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But is it allowed for users to choose a machine that forbids this?

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.

What do you think of the counterargument that, as soon as you put a switch like that in, people will get manipulated into flipping it?

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#213

Post by esotericn »

DagAgren wrote: post #139
pjc50 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#214

Post by microcolonel »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #197
roenxi wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 every…

> 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…

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.

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#215

Post by ithkuil »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #41
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 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 origina…

Do you know whether Google installs their own signed kext kernel module, or do they rely on this project (and the fork is only for user space bits)?

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#216

Post by mdellavo »

jasonkester wrote: post #49

Good for him. 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…

at one point - the spirit of the OSS movement was giving away things for free.

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#217

Post by mdellavo »

hapless wrote: post #65

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…

OSS means allowing "free riders"

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#218

Post by nicky0 »

znpy wrote: post #114

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…

This is the exact reason why I prefer BSD/MIT/Apache type licenses. It doesn't try to control people. GPL has a very offputting authoritarian bent.

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#219

Post by adrianN »

dkdkdjdj wrote: post #212
adrianN wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What do you think of the counterargument that, as soon as you put a switch like that in, people will get manipulated into flipping it?

I think the risk of that can be made sufficiently low so that it won't be a serious problem in practice.
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