Comment by dangus
11 days ago
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".
I’m not even claiming that people who feel thar feel that a social contract has been violated are correct.
I’m saying that the open source rug pull is at this point a known business tactic that is essentially a psychological dark pattern used to exploit.
These companies know they’ll get more traction and sales if they have “open source” on their marketing material. They don’t/never actually intend to be open source long term. They expect to go closed source/source available business lines as soon as they’ve locked enough people into the ecosystem.
Open source maintainers/organizations like the GNU project are happy and enthusiastic about delivering their projects to “freeloaders.” They have a sincere belief that having source code freedom is beneficial to all involved. Even corporate project sponsors share this belief: Meta is happy to give away React because they know that ultimately makes their own products better and more competitive.
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.
> shady business tactic
I'd say it's redundant to consider any business tactic as "shady". The purpose of any business is to make a profit, in any way that's legally permissible. Using the "open source" label is just one way to success, if one plays the game well and mitigates any backlash once they "graduate" and change that license. It's up to any given user going in to be aware that a project they depend on may go in any direction, like it or not, and to always be ready to migrate if deemed necessary.
2 replies →
> 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?