Local Stack Archived their GitHub repo and requires an account to run • Hacker News Board

Re: Local Stack Archived their GitHub repo and requires an account to run

#51

Post by reactordev » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 9:52 PM UTC

skeledrew wrote: post #48

hungryhobbit wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, so a company shared their work with the public for however long, then decided to leave what was shared up ... but stop sharing ... and you're upset?!? They did everything properly by the rules of OSS, decided it wasn't in their best interest to keep doing OSS, and left all their code available, as required by OSS. They were a textbook good participant. Meanwhile, 99% of companies never open source anything: why…

> a company shared their work with the public for however long, then decided to leave what was shared up More like a company took advantage of a community that expected their freely offered labor to not be commercialized at any point in time without making available said works in a fully free vector as well, as that's an implicit expectation behind "open source".

Naive fools…

Companies stand to turn a profit. OSS is here to help enable that or push the goal posts. It’s not a charity unless the org feels charitable. Sure, non-profits exist but they were never one of those.

Re: Local Stack Archived their GitHub repo and requires an account to run

#52

Post by jrflowers » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 9:53 PM UTC

imiric wrote: post #43

inetknght wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance You might want to get your arguments in order. In one sentence you're calling OSS rugpulls a problem, and then in another you're claiming that proprietary products behave more ethically. So which is it? Is it less-ethical to have provided software as open source, and then later become a proprietary product? Why? I see having source code, even for an old/unmaintained…

You might want to think about my argument a bit more. > Is it less-ethical to have provided software as open source, and then later become a proprietary product? Why? Because usually these companies use OSS as a marketing gimmick, not because they believe in it, or want to contribute to a public good. So, yes, this dishonesty is user hostile, and some companies with proprietary products do have more respect for their…

It seems like you’re trying to build a system of ethics around being annoyed by OSS maintainers not working for free in perpetuity.

Having access to Apache licensed code that you can build off of is better than never having access to any code at all. Anything else about values or respect has to be inferred or imagined and has no bearing on the software itself.

Edit: Like who cares if they “wanted” to contribute to the public good? Did they actually contribute to the public good? It seems like they did and the code that did so is right there. If “life happens” then why are they obligated to do a smooth transition?

I love free stuff as much as the next person, hell, free stuff is my favorite kind of stuff. Is it annoying when there’s less free stuff? Yes. Does my personal irritation constitute a violation of a lofty set of ideals that just coincidentally dictates that nobody annoy me? No.

I would love to live in a world where it just so happens that it’s ethically wrong to bother me though. That would be sweet.

Re: Local Stack Archived their GitHub repo and requires an account to run

#53

Post by luipugs » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 9:58 PM UTC

skeledrew wrote: post #46

obsidianbases1 wrote: post #36

There's going to be a lot of complaints about open-source restricting access. It's going to keep happening because it just doesn't make sense for a lot of previous business models that supported and open-source project, something that was seen recently with tailwind. In one of my projects, one that remains source-available, I had encountered an "open-source justice warrior" that made it their mission to smear the pro…

A thing cannot be considered free/open source if there are restrictions on what users can do with it. If a maintainer wishes to put a "don't compete commercially" license then it should be clearly labelled as source available, not open source. To do otherwise is to deceive the open source community, which has a particular and well defined understanding of what "open source" entails.

Are you arguing that copyleft is not open source?

Re: Local Stack Archived their GitHub repo and requires an account to run

#54

Post by UltraSane » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 10:01 PM UTC

jayofdoom wrote: post #22

More reason to run your infrastructure using open source software in your own datacenter. OpenStack has been around for closing in on two decades, running clouds and being mostly governance-drama-free. It's not surprising that a proprietary ecosystem built on open source software locked up behind a gate doesn't make a worthwhile ecosystem for building open source tooling against.

OpenStack is one of the most complicated platforms in existence and finding suitably talented admins is very hard.

Re: Local Stack Archived their GitHub repo and requires an account to run

#55

Post by ianbutler » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 10:06 PM UTC

jrflowers wrote: post #52

imiric wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might want to think about my argument a bit more. > Is it less-ethical to have provided software as open source, and then later become a proprietary product? Why? Because usually these companies use OSS as a marketing gimmick, not because they believe in it, or want to contribute to a public good. So, yes, this dishonesty is user hostile, and some companies with proprietary products do have more respect for their…

It seems like you’re trying to build a system of ethics around being annoyed by OSS maintainers not working for free in perpetuity. Having access to Apache licensed code that you can build off of is better than never having access to any code at all. Anything else about values or respect has to be inferred or imagined and has no bearing on the software itself. Edit: Like who cares if they “wanted” to contribute to th…

That's what they always do it always comes down to a sense of perpetual entitlement over the work of others, work they themselves would never do.

I've had the same discussion for years now on HN. It is not unethical to decide to stop supporting something especially if you played by all the rules the entire time.

No one is owed perpetual labor and they completely disregard localstack has been oss for something like 10 years at this point just celebrate it had a good run, fork and maintain yourself if you need it that badly.

It is incredibly weird to think something that was maintained oss for 10 years is a rugpull that's just called life, circumstances change.

Re: Local Stack Archived their GitHub repo and requires an account to run

#56

Post by egorfine » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 10:18 PM UTC

jayofdoom wrote: post #22

More reason to run your infrastructure using open source software in your own datacenter. OpenStack has been around for closing in on two decades, running clouds and being mostly governance-drama-free. It's not surprising that a proprietary ecosystem built on open source software locked up behind a gate doesn't make a worthwhile ecosystem for building open source tooling against.

> More reason to run your infrastructure using open source software in your own datacenter

Until they stop being open source. Like, you know, LocalStack.

Re: Local Stack Archived their GitHub repo and requires an account to run

#57

Post by egorfine » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 10:19 PM UTC

strickjb9 wrote: post #18

matt_callmann wrote: post #4

What are the alternatives? I primarily used it for S3 and SQS emulation.

MinIO is a drop in replacement for S3. I plan on switching to this as soon as I can. For now, I just pinned localstack to 4.14.0

> I plan on switching to this as soon as I can

Too late.

Re: Local Stack Archived their GitHub repo and requires an account to run

#58

Post by papyrus9244 » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 10:21 PM UTC

hungryhobbit wrote: post #27

tecleandor wrote: post #11

They still have linked their OpenCollective account, where they have raised $10K and still have a balance of $5K. [0] It's not a lot in the great scheme of things, but, have they been using a platform that's seemingly built for communities and open source to bootstrap their business? Because this is not a 'open core' situation. They just closed the repo and ran away. If they had that idea all along, I feel like it ha…

Wait, so a company shared their work with the public for however long, then decided to leave what was shared up ... but stop sharing ... and you're upset?!? They did everything properly by the rules of OSS, decided it wasn't in their best interest to keep doing OSS, and left all their code available, as required by OSS. They were a textbook good participant. Meanwhile, 99% of companies never open source anything: why…

> and left all their code available, as required by OSS.

IANAL, and I don't have a horse in this race, but I don't think that's required by OSS, not by the spirit of "the law", and (at least) not by GPL, MIT, and other similar mainstream licenses.

The spirit of open source is: you buy (or just download for free) a binary, you get the 4 rights. Whatever happens when the developer/company stops distributing (whether at a cost or free as in beer) that binary is completely outside the scope of the license.

Re: Local Stack Archived their GitHub repo and requires an account to run

#59

Post by lukevp » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 10:28 PM UTC

armchairhacker wrote: post #41

imiric wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can people still not understand that OSS can be abused? It doesn't matter that the previous code is still available. Nobody can technically delete it from the internet, so that's hardly something they did "right". The original maintainers are gone, and users will have to rely on someone else to pick up the work, or maintain it themselves. All of this creates friction, and fragments the community. And are you not…

> It doesn't matter that the previous code is still available…The original maintainers are gone, and users will have to rely on someone else to pick up the work, or maintain it themselves. It does matter: popular products have been forked or the open-source component was reused. E.g. Terraform and OpenTofu, Redis and Redict, Docker and Colima (partly MinIO and RustFS; the latter is a full rewrite, but since the forme…

I thought Valkey was the blessed fork of Redis. Is Redict better in some way?

Re: Local Stack Archived their GitHub repo and requires an account to run

#60

Post by mgulick » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 10:31 PM UTC

luipugs wrote: post #53

skeledrew wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A thing cannot be considered free/open source if there are restrictions on what users can do with it. If a maintainer wishes to put a "don't compete commercially" license then it should be clearly labelled as source available, not open source. To do otherwise is to deceive the open source community, which has a particular and well defined understanding of what "open source" entails.

Are you arguing that copyleft is not open source?

From https://opensource.org/osd:

> 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor > > The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.

A non-commercial clause is a discrimination against a field of endeavor and thus non-open-source. The license cannot restrict how the user is able to *use* the software and still be open source. There can however be requirements to distribute the source code when distributing the software, ala GPL.