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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

#361

Post by ericd »

lambda wrote: post #274
hizanberg wrote: post #23

Likely the best outcome for the project barring company sponsorship that pays him to continue working on it as OSS. He's been the sole maintainer on the project since 2012 [1] and has never been compensated for it, he says it will always be free to end users but wants companies that are financially benefiting from it to help sponsor continued development [2]: > I will never ask end users for financial support. FUSE w…

> He's been the sole maintainer on the project since 2012 [1] and has never been compensated for it I have to object to that. I work for a company which pays him to build branded versions of FUSE for macOS, and has been doing so for several years. He does reliably ship us new builds, but it has sometimes been a little difficult to get him to respond to feature requests or even patches that we send him. I don't believ…

Sounds like a lot of additional work for him to provide custom builds? Maybe he wants to be paid for the core product development that provides most of the value?

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#362

Post by laughinghan »

CathedralBorrow wrote: post #303
laughinghan wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would I say what is a more balanced take on what matter? The two quotes you pulled appear to be takes on different matters.

They might seem to be, so let me explain: To me it looked like you were doing exactly what you accused the other poster of -- immediately sorting them into the 'villain' bin and taking a self-righteous stand against them.

Interesting. To me, calling people "calm" doesn't sound particularly heroic, nor does calling someone "self-righteous" sound particularly villainous when I don't suggest they did any harm. Being harmlessly self-righteous may be embarrassing, perhaps, but hardly villainous.

By contrast, "free riders", "huge amount of unpaid work [for] wealthy software workers", "No world has ever produced a violin small enough to play an elegy for those “victims.”"—I don't think I addressed my parent in remotely approaching that much disdain.

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#363

Post by fierarul »

driverdan wrote: post #345
fierarul wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW nobody donates their BitCoins. And very rarely their USD. So it's not for the lack of currencies or ways of showing support. People just don't value these projects until they get abandoned.

I used to only donate in BTC. It reduced fees and promoted the use of BTC as a currency. Unfortunately that's not longer the case. Fees have increased significantly and complexity has increased, reducing the number of non-profits that accept it.

Imho BTC stopped being / trying to be a currency long ago. Now it's hoarded as digital gold. Which explains why it's not spent / donated as much.

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#364

Post by laughinghan »

pjmlp wrote: post #350
laughinghan wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tiny part? Your immediate preceding sentence observes that the large pool of kernel contributors live on salaries provided to them by Fortune 500 companies. Is that a roundabout way of admitting that you're wrong and open source can be sustainable?

Not even close, because those developers are employees from Fortune 500 companies in one way or the other, they are not being paid by other developers paying to use Linux based software as such.

I don't understand. "Not even close to sustainable", you say, then complete the sentence by describing the situation in which Linux has been and continues to be sustainable.

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#365

Post by laughinghan »

dmitriid wrote: post #331
laughinghan wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, big corporations like Google, who is perfectly capable of paying for osxfuse, too. Balk? You think the MBAs at those big corporations are pushing them to pay for Linux over the objections of the devs? No, devs don't balk, devs are the reason those companies are paying for Linux. What in the world do any of your points have to do with the discussion at hand? My parent, pjmlp, claimed that (1) open source can't be…

- There are very few sustainable opensource projects. - Of those which are, such as Linux, they are sustainable not because community cares about them (they might or might not) or because community pays for them (they might or might not), but because corporations find enough vested in them to support them (through money and/or people). I highly doubt Linux Foundation is sustainable without corporate sponsors. - If yo…

So...you're not disagreeing with anything I said, you're just trying to educate me on how difficult it is to build sustainable open source projects? Thanks, I'm painfully aware, I have experience maintaining an unsustainable open source project.

Or maybe you are trying to disagree with me, in the self-contradictory sentence in which you state that projects like Linux are not sustainable because community cares about them, but because community members find enough vested in them to support them. What's the difference between "care about" and "vested in and support"?

Or, for some reason, you and pjmlp don't consider people who work at corporations to be "community members". Turns out if you exclude most of the people who are paid to work on open source, then you find that there's no money being put into open source!

Look, I'm sorry to be snarky, but it's frustrating to be told facts that don't contradict nor add to what I've been saying, and that I'm already all too aware of. I don't know what point you're trying to make.

If you're just trying to point out that many important open source projects can't get corporate backing to become sustainable, again, I already know that from painful personal experience, but in the case of osxfuse it actually seems like it is in a position to get Google to pay up, and in any case the problem of sustainability in open source is squarely not the open source community's fault like pjmlp implied. That's been my point the whole time. I don't know what yours is.

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#366

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

aembleton wrote: post #123
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…

Why should companies give back when the code was licenced in such a way as to not require it? If a developer works on a project and wants commercial companies to give back then they can choose a suitable licence such as GPLv3; if they just want to get their code out there and don't really mind how it's used then BSD is more suitable.

Maybe they don't need to, but it would be good to have an ecosystem that incentiviszed sharing instead of relegating it to an altruistic few. That's on both the companies and the creators.

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#367

Post by ajconway »

arminiusreturns wrote: post #360
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…

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.

Ultimately, BSD is less restrictive than GPL.

Users won't have any power if they don't have software to use. It just happens that BSD (or similar) licenses are easier to deal with when developing things.

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#368

Post by saagarjha »

mr__y wrote: post #196
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.

>No sensible person goes into FOSS for the money well, going FOSS can be an effective marketing strategy: by making something open and free (in both meanings) you get much higher probability of that something becoming popular. That in turn gives a lot new opportunities to sell complementary something or other something. This is best case scenario though, and you need to have resources/other sources of income for the…

> going FOSS can be an effective marketing strategy: by making something open and free (in both meanings) you get much higher probability of that something becoming popular. That in turn gives a lot new opportunities to sell complementary something or other something.

Right, and then people try to do that, fail to sell whatever it is that they thought they would, and end up putting some sort of annoyance on the code to punish those who are using it.

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#369

Post by saagarjha »

fierarul wrote: post #180
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…

+1 > after spending thousands of dollars on a MacOS system Note how much the developer also pays in hardware and in subscriptions like the Apple Developer account. Apple does not give free certificates for open source projects. Everybody must pay!

It’s not like those things are useless outside of the context of this project.

Re: FUSE for macOS is no longer open source

#370

Post by saagarjha »

upofadown wrote: post #336
saagarjha wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple makes it very difficult to use 3rd party kernel modules. That is the whole thing. The open source thing is a complete red herring I would argue that the Apple part is the red herring. It’s boring; it’s common knowledge that they don’t particularly like kernel extensions and it’s somewhat difficult to develop them. > No one else could actually use the result of compiling the code. So the source was not ever op…

Simply being able to see the source code does not make it "Open". You have to be able to use it for what it is intended.

Yeah, you can compile it yourself and load it if the source had been available…
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