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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

#311

Post by hemancuso »

derefr wrote: post #307
tw04 wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But the current maintainer has the Apple provided signing cert, that's the whip hand in this whole deal. So apply for a new signing cert? The only thing I'm hearing is "he closed and I don't want him to close it but forking it takes a lot of effort and I don't want to put in that effort". If nobody is willing to put even the basic effort of applying for a new signing cert, color me skeptical that they'll actually ma…

From what I recall, Apple really doesn’t like signing competing forks of the same software. It’s next to impossible to get e.g. your own fork of Firefox into the App Store. They see it as a phishing attempt on the “real” app, I think.

ExpanDrive [which I maintain], has a certificate to sign our fork of FUSE

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#312

Post by newhouseb »

thayne wrote: post #308
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that even happen with these small projects. Having the ability to audit is pointless if it never happens.

Well, I'd be surprised if companies like Dropbox and Google didn't audit it. And if it is used as much the article says, it would also be a decent target for security researchers, if for no other reason than they could send a bounty request to the big companies that rely on it.

Dropbox doesn't use FUSE -- in large part because I was terrified of adopting 60k LoC in the kernel (from FUSE) that we weren't experts on versus 1k LoC that we actually needed (and had audited by third parties).

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#313

Post by intsunny »

jeltz wrote: post #226
baq wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You mostly associate GPL with capitalism?

The GNU created the GPL and licensed most of their software under it. I can't think of an organization less interested in capitalism. Rather the opposite because the viral nature of the license.

Linus picked the GPL to be less commercial/restrictive than the Minix source code.

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#314

Post by bagacrap »

larodi wrote: post #95

this quite reminds of the openssl saga, but on a smaller scale, with single developer more or less responsible for world's encryption for decade. it's a pity, it's a shame that companies who use FOSS benefit, but do not understand (or do, but ignore) the idea of FOSS, which is to give back to community. this also includes other FOSS companies, etc as everyone uses openssl, zlib and sqlite. to base a project on FOSS r…

If a large software company had to pay 0.1% of its profit (revenue?) to each foss dependency they wouldn't have any left.

And contributing back is not as easy as lobbing code over the wall, you have to spend a lot of time and energy coming to agreements on what makes sense to share and how to organize it. It would probably be a full time job for Mr Benjamin to vet external contributions even if everyone could agree that all were desirable.

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#315

Post by 72deluxe »

toyg wrote: post #289
72deluxe wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure? I am certain it's accelerating. More and more people use the Internet for their daily life and more and more services are "going digital". I know some 16 year olds (born 2003, after XP how depressing, I feel old) and the concept of NOT having the Internet and dirt cheap music streaming etc. is completely alien to them. They also have no concept of privacy and will install every service known to man on t…

I was installing everything that was “free” back in 1995. You cannot expect a teenager to be familiar with internet-privacy mantras; it’s actually horrible how we’ve created a situation where these poor kids are forced to learn and self-defend against an onslaught of trackers.

Agree! I can't see it getting any better for 99% of users either - you have to be quite technical.

And once DNS over HTTPS is the norm (thanks Google + Microsoft) I literally have no clue what I'm going to do - I won't be able to stop any of the tracking domains requested or "telemetry".

It's a nightmare and I think the Internet will be "over" for me at that point.

eg. Little Snitch tells me all the outgoing requests on my Mac, I have to run piHole for DNS to block 27% of my DNS requests (yes that much), OOSU10 is mandatory on Windows 10 to turn off a boatload of telemetry, and every site on earth these days don't self-host - they pull from 20 different sites instead of just their own site. That's 21 different organisations that know I've visited their site,

eg. visiting White Stuff's website (clothing) for my wife and I get whitestuff.com, googletagmanager.com, google-analytics.com, wsweboptimisejs.blob.core.windows.net, via.placeholder.com, tag.bounceexchange.com, fsm.attraqt.com, fonts.googleapis.com, data.rci.eggplant.cloud, cdn.optimizely.com, c3n4sovn.cloudimg.io

It's ludicrous.

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#316

Post by marcus_holmes »

lonelappde wrote: post #310
marcus_holmes wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a startup tech founder, benefiting massively from FOSS code. I realise there is a debt here, and the plan is definitely to repay that debt once we're cash-positive. Being able to have that plan, and not having to pay for software licences up front, is awesome. But I totally understand TFA's point of view. Maintaining a FOSS library is hard work, and those benefiting from it should contribute. If he's not seeing t…

Have you offered equity shares or options to your FOSS providers, as you do for your direct employees? If not, why not?

Because I think that owning a tiny shareholding in a business is more hassle than it's worth for everyone involved. Options is more of a possibility, but again, more hassle than just cash. And involves more explanation to non-techies who won't understand, and will possibly intervene.

I can just put "software licence" as a budget line item and make a payment, and everyone's happy, no questions asked.

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#317

Post by marcus_holmes »

the_duke wrote: post #281
marcus_holmes wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a startup tech founder, benefiting massively from FOSS code. I realise there is a debt here, and the plan is definitely to repay that debt once we're cash-positive. Being able to have that plan, and not having to pay for software licences up front, is awesome. But I totally understand TFA's point of view. Maintaining a FOSS library is hard work, and those benefiting from it should contribute. If he's not seeing t…

The problem with tech startups, especially VC funded ones, is that they are rarely profitable until they are sold to a bigger company or (in rare cases) go public. And once either of those happens, there will be forces opposing substantial OS contributions ("fiduciary duty" etc), which will win out if the leadership doesn't fight for it.

This is why I said "cash positive" not "profitable". Not the same thing. e.g. Amazon is cash positive, but not profitable.

My priority is making sure payroll is covered. After that, I'd put OS contributions as an infrastructure cost (like licence fees for paid software), so fairly high up the list of priorities, and an annual budget item.

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#318

Post by cr0sh »

I find this to be yet another example of why the GPL (in general) was created, and why licenses like or similar to the BSD license are flawed.

The way I see the GPL is that by modifying and publicly releasing the modified version of the binary, the payment for being able to do that is paid, at a minimum, in the code that should be released to accompany those changes.

You want to use my code, and not pay me for it with money? Then pay me (or pay it forward) with the code instead.

The BSD license and other similar licenses, while seemingly more free - really aren't. They allow for someone or some company to just come in, take the code, then profit off of it in a closed-source manner - provided they give some acknowledgement somewhere that it came from the original BSD based project or whatnot.

Now - granted - in neither case would the programmer get paid money - but in the case of the GPL, at the very least the changes, fixes, updates, whatever - get "paid for" in code. It won't put food on the table, but it is the least that someone could do, imho, by benefitting from the rest of the codebase.

I note that the above is a very simplified understanding of the GPL, BSD, etc - and of this issue in general. But I still think the basic idea stands; that at its core, the GPL is about "paying for" code with code, so that code nor changes to it will ever "go missing" or become "locked up" into some proprietary version of the code, and ultimately benefiting users less (whether they know or understand it or not).

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#319

Post by ben509 »

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?

IANAL, but a license, can't, in itself, restrict anyone's rights because it is a grant of usage, and a more restrictive licenses is really a lesser grant. In the case of software licenses, the rights were already restricted by the claim of copyright.

And that's generally the case: you give someone license to enter your home, which they were implicitly restricted from by your holding the right to passage about your property.

The legal mechanism that lets you negotiate to restrict your or others rights is a contract, and that's completely different from a license.

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#320

Post by hemancuso »

I think this is fairly overblown, there are a fair number of FUSE for macOS forks out there with signing certificates.

I have kext signing certificate for ExpanDrive, Google has one for Google Filestream, I suspect many others have one as well. Rightfully, Apple doesn't hand them out as easily as they do with regular developer certificates, but if you want one and do a reasonable job representing that you're not going to panic end-user systems, you can get one too.

FUSE for macOS remains open source, fork it if you want. Benjamin merely decided not to work on it for free anymore and essentially providing bug fixes etc for those who pay for it.

Lastly - FUSE of macOS is not going to be around in the current form much longer. Apple has made it abundantly clear that Kernel Extensions are on the way out, and that macOS 10.15 will be the last release to fully support kexts without compromises. Check this slide from WWDC

https://imgur.com/a/EAzT6Ch

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