Comment by StopDisinfo910
13 days ago
> then doing a bait-and-switch
FOSS is not a moral contract. People working for free owe nothing to no one. You got what's on the tin - the code is as open source once they stop as when they started.
The underlying assumption of your message is that you are somehow entitled to their continued labour which is absolutely not the case.
It's a social contract, which for many people is a moral contract.
Where is this mythical social contract found? I stand by my point: it's a software license, not a marriage.
Free users certainly would like it to be a social contract like I would like to be gifted a million dollars. Sadly, I still have to work and can't infinitely rely on the generosity of others.
The social contract is found (and implicitly negotiated) in the interactions between humans, ie: society.
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Where is the contract to return the shopping cart to the corral?
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Show me a FOSS license where a commitment to indefinite maintenance is promised.
Social contracts are typically unwritten so the license would be the wrong place to look for it.
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Expectations are maybe fine maybe not, but it's funny that people can slap the word moral onto their expectation of others being obligated to do free work for them, and it's supposed to make them be the good guys here.
Why do you presume to think your definition of morals is shared by everyone? Why is entitlement to others labor the moral position, instead of the immoral position?
> Why is entitlement to others labor the moral position, instead of the immoral position?
You seem to be mistaking me for someone arguing that anyone is entitled to others' labour?
No, social contracts require some sort of mutual benefit.
it's still a bait and switch, considering they started removing features before the abandonment.
Users can fork it from point they started removing features. Fully inside social, moral and spiritual contract of open source.
Everyone is keying on forced free labor, but that's not really the proposed solution when an open-source project ends. The fact that it ends is a given, the question then is what to do about all the users. Providing an offramp (migration tools that move to another solution that's similar, or even just suggested other solutions, even including your own commercial offering) before closing up shop seems like a decent thing to do.
This isn’t about people working for free.
Nobody sensible is upset when a true FOSS “working for free” person hangs up their boots and calls it quits.
The issue here is that these are commercial products that abuse the FOSS ideals to run a bait and switch.
They look like they are open source in their growth phase then they rug pull when people start to depend on their underlying technology.
The company still exists and still makes money, but they stopped supporting their open source variant to try and push more people to pay, or they changed licenses to be more restrictive.
It has happened over and over, just look at Progress Chef, MongoDB, ElasticSearch, Redis, Terraform, etc.
In this particular case, it's the fault of the "abused" for even seeing themselves as such in the first place. Many times it's not even a "bait-and-switch", but reality hitting. But even if it was, just deal with it and move on.
This is definitely the case because the accusations and supposed social contract seem extremely one-sided towards free riding.
Nobody here is saying they should donate the last version of MinIO to the Apache software foundation under the Apache license. Nobody is arguing for a formalized "end of life" exit strategy for company oriented open source software or implying that such a strategy was promised and then betrayed.
The demand is always "keep doing work for me for free".
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Make hay while the sun shines. Be glad that the project happened.
I’m not even claiming that the “abused” are correct to be upset.
The core of my claim is that it’s a shady business tactic because the purpose of it is to gain all the marketing benefits of open source on the front-end (fast user growth, unpaid contributions from users, “street cred” and positive goodwill), then change to source available/business license after the end of the growth phase when users are locked in.
This is not much different than Southwest Airlines spending decades bragging about “bags fly free” and no fees only to pull the rug and dump their customer goodwill in the toilet.
Totally legal to do so, but it’s also totally legal for me to think that they’re dishonest scumbags.
Except in this case, software companies, in my opinion, have this rug pull plan in place from day 1.
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> bait and switch
Is it really though? They're replacing one product with another, and the replacement comes with a free version.
Free without commercial restrictions? With a real open source license?