See also: https://tidelift.com/
You pay them to support an open source product. Only a small number of things covered at present, but maybe better than doing it yourself.
FUSE for macOS is no longer open source
351–360 of 407 posts
Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source
#352It 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.
I'm not sure if the dev feels entitled for _compensation_ per se, but G and other companies don't contribute back to the project in any form. Not $ and not in code. Now that is not a very good thing... though technically that's exactly what you get with permissive O/S licenses. It looks like the dev realized that and changed the license. It also doesn't look like he trusts this companies much, because otherwise he co…
>G and other companies don't contribute back to the project in any form. Not $ and not in code
osxfuse is a fork of Google's MacFuse...
Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure how that works, legally. If I understand you, you're suggesting that you can GPL your work to create leverage in a future negotiation with a potential user who wants to modify it privately and/or integrate it into proprietary software. Can you un-GPL your work for a single entity? Doesn't that mean that you yourself are violating the GPL? I'm legitimately asking, not being rhetorical.
If you're the sole author of the code (or own the copyright or have the ability to relicense), then you can. It's not "un-GPL"ing the code because whatever you GPL'd will continue to be available under the GPL forever. But you can say, hey, I'm ALSO releasing this code under a separate commercial license that costs $X dollars to get. You can't infringe on your own copyright!
Well, that's pretty cool actually. I was unaware that was an option, and I'm pretty sure that many other people don't know that's an option either! It seems eminently fair to ask for money from people who are making money from your thing (and if they aren't, to not ask for anything).
Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source
#354Earlier 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?
Red Hat sort of did that when they had their IPO. They allowed contributors to the open source they used to buy Red Hat shares during their IPO at the IPO price.
They were remarkably generous in who they considered to be a contributor for this. For example, I found a bug in trn that caused it to trash .newsrc files on Red Hat. I spent about 30 minutes figuring out what was going on, and submitted a patch to Red Hat to fix it. It was a very simple patch, merely changing a declaration of one variable from char to unsigned int [1].
This was enough for Red Hat to classify me as a contributor and invite me to participate in the IPO. I bought $2000 worth of their stock at the IPO price on the morning of the IPO, and sold it that afternoon for $9000.
[1] There was some function or macro that given a character returned a set of flags indicating if the character was upper case, lower case, numeric, etc., and apparently on all other systems the flags that trn cared about where in the lower 8 bits, and so storing the flags in a char worked. On the then newest Red Hat, that was not true.
Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source
#355I 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 wit…
On the flip of this, if it were GPL it likely wouldn't have seen the adoption by commercial companies that it has had. Barring whatever signing key they are talking about, nothing is in principle barring people from forking this and continuing it as open source.
No code has "gone missing" or has become "locked up." You simply don't have access to the new code he's written, and why should you? Frankly, if this were GPL the result would have likely been that he simply stopped working on it. You still wouldn't have gotten any code you think you deserve, and you also wouldn't have the current commercial option.
This example just highlights to me why I prefer licenses like the BSD license.
Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source
#356FUSE is a fantastic project that I’ve used since it’s inception.
I did notice commercial projects using the source, and if there’s only one dev, I agree he does deserve compensation.
Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source
#357By the way if you are searching for some cross-platform FUSE-like alternative for a project I encourage you to try WebDAV if something else is your bottleneck.
It saved me some headaches from bundling an installer for macFUSE or Dokan's blue screens in the past. There are server implementations and also FUSE wrappers on GitHub. It's not perfect but worth a try. And it's supported directly by many OS.
Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
Forbidding users from doing dangerous stuff with the machines they own is not good imho.
You can disable all of those checks by booting from the recovery partition, opening the Terminal and use `csrutil disable`. Then you can do with your machine whatever you want.
Yep. Same with Windows; you get a big red screen and warning message when checks are disabled. You have to be able to do this in order to develop custom drivers and kernel extensions.
One the one hand, it makes it difficult for regular users to install malicious root-kits, but it also limits all wide scale adoption of FOSS tech like this at the pure whims and discretion of Apple.
Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, in this specific case, I think the best outcome would be for Apple to merge the module in the MAC OSX kernel so it's there by default, FUSE is kind of a de-facto standard and is clearly a widely useful piece of code. But, big picture, yes a lot of OSS projects have the same issue. Funding is clearly one aspect, but another aspect is also to work on having less "single person projects" (and I'm not talking about…
I wouldn't mind if there was a "DONATE" button, I'd certainly donate 5$ or 10$. Under these circumstances even more since this driver is unique and several other drivers I use depend on it. (sshfs, perkeep, ext4fuse, ...) Probably these small but frequently used projects should also be supported by the FSF, at least in the *GPL case.
So this is an area of significant interest to me. I have researched this extensively, talked to a few dozen medium-to-large OSS maintainers, and have a project on the back burner about this. The only conclusion I've been able to draw is that literally every approach from OpenCollective to a PayPal link demonstrably does not work. Donations do not work.
You have to give people something of value, even if nominal value, to actually get corporate interest and to drive the kind of ROI that makes it viable to continue spending so much dang time on these projects. And a lot of people pfft at that and wave their hands about their right to other people's free time (or that an invisible hand will Make Things Work should those people choose to spend their free time in other ways, ignoring that that usually just means other people get to burn out instead). The only sustainable way to build open-source software is to get businesses to pay for it. And that's why we're where we are with these conversations: it's not the end-user free riders who matter, it's the commercial ones.
(I don't think the Redis license is the right approach, FWIW. I think there are better ones. Happy to chat offline with folks who have a similar interest in this space; email's in my profile.)
Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source
#360Earlier 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…
Ugg. So tired of this misunderstanding of GPL...
You can sell GPL software!
All BSD/MIT does is allow it to end up tivoized and remove power from the user. GPL is freedom for the user. BSD is freedom for the dev. Not all users are devs, but all devs are users. Users should take precedence.