Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

colatkinson.site

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 407 posts

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#221

Post by dangus »

> 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 software licenses is that they don’t supersede your own ownership of copyright.

As the nearly-sole contributor, the author can violate his own license for the code he created. Even if the whole thing was GPLv3, I think he could simply remove anyone else’s contributed commits and take the rest as proprietary code. It doesn’t sound like much work was done by other contributors on this project anyway.

Now, if he’s closed sourcing and using/changing someone else’s contributions that were licensed to the public in a copyleft license, that’s a different story.

(IANAL)

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#222

Post by nicky0 »

tinus_hn wrote: post #156
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…

How is the software ‘Free’ if that freedom depends on your choice of OS or hardware? Free software is allowed to be used by anyone for any purpose.

Becayse you're free to take the existing source code and adapt the software to work with your choice of OS and hardware. There is no requirement for free software to support every platform in existence out of the box.

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#223

Post by jeltz »

pjmlp wrote: post #187
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…

Really fine, maybe next year we get the FOSS desktop.

So what? Maybe FOSS cannot get us a competitive modern desktop, but in many areas open source projects have virtually eliminated all proprietary competition. Linux is running everywhere these days and e.g. in databases it is among the open source options where the growth is. Does FOSS need to be able to solve all software problems in the world for you to count it as successful?

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#224

Post by ohithereyou »

angry_octet wrote: post #174

We need something like carbon credits for open source. As in, if you contribute to open source you earn credits. If you make lots of use of open source but don't contribute back you need to buy open source credits. How we would value open source is a tricky question. Would AWS owe a gazillion credits for all the hours of linux and apache they've burnt? Probably doesn't make sense. Maybe a logarithmic scale. But the r…

To me, this is the root of the difference between Free (libre) software as defined by the FSF and open source software as popularized by the OSI.

The primary case for open source is business and money - money is more efficiently spent on supporting open source, and all of the businesses that spend money on open source get to benefit from contributions from others. In this model an open source economy is desirable because that's how you prevent one greater fool from funding all of the open source software that everyone else uses without paying.

The primary case for Free (libre) software is the social utility/social value of the software. Their case is primarily moral and ethical first. They're not against making money on Free (libre) software, but that's not their end goal. Their end goals are political and focused on end users, not businesses.

I'm not trying to say one is inherently better than the other, just trying to highlight the differences.

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#225

Post by [deleted] »

diffeomorphism wrote: post #168
huhtenberg wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know exactly what you mean, but this is incorrect. CC is not "closed source". CC makes a license incompatible with the OSI definition of "open source", which is one of the interpretations of the term. There's a persistent confusion over the difference between OSI's definition and the casual understanding of it. To the laymen, if you can _see_ the source, then it's an _open_ source. And if you can _use_ and _change_…

No, that is completely wrong. If you can _see_ the source, then it is _shared_ source ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_Source_Initiative ). If you can _use_ and _change_ it, then it's a _open_ source. Are you going to tell me next that "free speech" means not paying for the radio? And that everything else is just one interpretation of the term? Or that freeware and free software are interchangeable terms? CC is…

[deleted]

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#226

Post by jeltz »

baq wrote: post #169
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the concept hasn't been as successful as some had hoped for when it comes to moving power and control over software away from big corporations towards users. As an anti-capitalist movement/dream, open source has utterly failed. As a concept that has provided lots of opportunities for developers and startups it has been a great success.

Agreed. The GPL has been a great success, so much so it's been banned by capitalists in their organizations with the result of dying pretty much everywhere except the kernel, GNU userland and an occasional dual licensed fully enterprise-copyrighted software. BSD with its take it and run with it approach enables people to make a living by modifying (or selling unmodified) software. The situation is dire especially in…

Personally I mostly associate GPL with capitalism, due to almost all projects controlled by a single for profit company using GPL while community and hobbyist projects more often tend to use BSD/MIT/Apache.

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#227

Post by im3w1l »

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…

It matters because

> FUSE for macOS (or, the kernel extension formerly known as osxfuse) is a project dating back to 2011. It in turn is based on even older projects, such as MacFUSE, the Linux FUSE module, and even some code open sourced by Apple.

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#228

Post by wildduck »

> 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.

Sounds like he should have released it under GPL type of licensing.

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#229

Post by tssva »

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 still a change of thought on the developers side.

In both scenarios the developer changing their license is not acting unethically nor were those previously using the code while meeting the terms it was previously available under.

What may be unethical is the developer trying to put blame for the license change on those that were using the code while meeting the requirements of the previous license because under the first scenario the developer is at fault and under the 2nd neither is at fault.

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#230

Post by aequitas »

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…

> developers realising that the work they do has value and that they’re not required to spend their lives giving it away for free.

As far as I understand he is still giving it away for free to users, but not allowing other companies to sell his work to for their profit only.

Post reply on HN