he 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 will always be free. However, what I'm asking for is for companies, that are selling FUSE-based products or rebrand FUSE and bundle it with their apps, to re-invest some of the profits in the continued development of FUSE on macOS, if they can afford it. I don't think that is unreasonable.

So he's just exercising the same BSD rights that all the other companies who have been taking and commercializing his work and not contributing back any fixes or funding for continued development.

Given that the alternative was to abandon the project [3], the only way it was going to see continued development as an OSS project was is if others took over maintenance/development of it, which anyone is free to do by creating and maintaining a fork.

[1] https://github.com/osxfuse/osxfuse/graphs/contributors

[2] https://github.com/osxfuse/osxfuse/issues/590#issuecomment-5...

[3] https://github.com/osxfuse/osxfuse/issues/590#issuecomment-5...

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simias 2 hours ago [-]

I agree that any aggressive towards the maintainer is unwarranted, even if I personally disagree with his move. In particular this comment quoted in TFA amused me:

>Then drop it and let someone else maintain it.

I want to reply to this person: then fork the last open source version and maintain that. That's the whole point really. Besides he apparently made the change two years ago and people only start noticing now, it's pretty clear that there's not a vibrant community of contributors ready to take the project over.

It's not entirely fair in this case because of the certificate needed to sign the kernel module but if it's really that difficult to get a certificate from Apple as an open source project that seems more like a problem with Apple than with osxfuse's maintainer. Besides what can he reasonably do? Just give the certificate to whoever asks for it? That's going to get it revoked by Apple in approximately 4 femtoseconds.

Companies benefiting from the work of opensource projects and not giving anything back is genuinely a big problem IMO. It's not illegal of course, but it is unethical in my opinion. Look at the state of OpenSSL, one of the most (if not the most) popular crypto library out there, who has to beg for scraps in order to fund the project. And when there's a critical vulnerability like heartbleed, who gets mocked online? The poor guy or gal who authored the commit, not the countless multi-billion dollar corporations who deployed their code for free without paying for a thorough audit or contributing anything back.

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marktangotango 3 minutes ago [-]

> then fork the last open source version and maintain that.

But the current maintainer has the Apple provided signing cert, that's the whip hand in this whole deal.

I personally don't blame this fellow and in fact apluad him. To many companies exploit OSS maintainers. I think it's great to see someone turn it around for once.

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marcus_holmes 15 minutes ago [-]

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 that happen organically, then he's quite within his rights to make it happen.

And to be fair, he's not even saying "I'll charge you". He's just saying "contact me". I'd speculate that if I needed to use his code, I could cut a deal where we would pay him when we get cash-positive.

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earonesty 6 minutes ago [-]

"Small companies don't have the resources"... that's some backward thinking right there.

By failing to contribute, small companies cost themselves money very quickly. How can a small business afford to live in a world of un-maintainable forks, patches and tech debt?

Only large companies can afford to maintain private forks of FOSS. Small companies have to give back, or they will simply disappear.

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tssva 1 hour ago [-]

There are two possible scenarios:

The developer always thought that contributing back code or financial support should be a requirement of use but failed to reflect this in the license chosen and now is correcting this.

The developer over time has changed their believe of what the requirements for use should or need to be. This change of thought may have been informed by the behavior of those using the code but is still a change of thought on the developers side.

In both scenarios the developer changing their license is not acting unethically nor were those previously using the code while meeting the terms it was previously available under.

What may be unethical is the developer trying to put blame for the license change on those that were using the code while meeting the requirements of the previous license because under the first scenario the developer is at fault and under the 2nd neither is at fault.

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simias 54 minutes ago [-]

In my system of value (which is of course subjective and you may not share) I do consider that these open source projects suffer a sort of tragedy of the commons where some companies benefit immensely from them (think how expensive it would be to build and maintain something like osxfuse from scratch) but don't contribute anything back to it. It's like big corporations managing to pay little to no taxes in the countries they do most of they business, is it illegal? Probably not in most cases. Still unethical in my personal opinion.

But instead of just complaining about it I could try to be more productive and offer an alternative. Maybe there could be a nonprofit dedicated to centralizing these donations and redistributing them, for instance by polling the donors to figure out what they use and then split the cake based on the results. I'm sure in many situations it's not so much that the company doesn't want to give anything bad, it's just that they can't be bothered or don't know how. I don't know how realistic that would be though.

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djsumdog 4 minutes ago [-]

Part of this goes back to the entire GPL/AGPL vs everything else debate. Everyone has been getting away from GPLv3 and it's derivatives for the past decade.

In that world, would it matter so much if some commercial interests took a product, since they'd always have to at least show their work? The idea was that we'd eventually have FOSS replacements for everything from Photoshop to Word to video editors.

2019 and GIMP is is nowhere near the level of Photoshop, Libreoffice is pretty decent through, and DarkTable isn't too shabby.

Still, this FOSS utopia of all our software never happened. Linux as a kernel for Android has led us to an even more closed system than before. Sure if Linux was GPLv3, maybe we wouldn't see it as the basis of Android at all, but if we had gone down that route, I wonder how things would be different.

I've written at length about this before: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/the-philosophy-of-open-source...

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saagarjha 36 minutes ago [-]

> think how expensive it would be to build and maintain something like osxfuse from scratch

Google did both for a while.

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m-p-3 1 hour ago [-]

> I agree that any aggressive towards the maintainer is unwarranted, even if I personally disagree with his move.

I also agree, being aggressive towards a volunteer maintainer achieves nothing and brings the possibility that he'll simply stops working altogether on it for free, like what happened with wiringPi some time ago.

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kakwa_ 4 hours ago [-]

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 one time PRs but a genuine second core developer). I'm not sure how to encourage that however, maybe more commonly adding "HELP WANTED!" in the project README, maybe a button "I want to become a permanent contributor of <PROJECT>" button in Github, I don't know. If you are alone on a project, even if funded, chances are you will loss interest after a while, leaving the project with tons of possible improvements not realized, and a on/off maintenance, having more "N>1 core developers projects" would help mitigate that.

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indigochill 2 hours ago [-]

Adding someone into a solo project introduces social overhead. That's not necessarily a bad thing and can even be a very good thing (I much prefer making music with other people and seeing how our influences mix as opposed to making music solo). But there is a cost/risk there which I could certainly see some solo developers just not being interested in taking on.

On the other hand, since this is OSS, if an organization does need N>1 badly enough, then they can commit their own resources to it, forking if necessary.

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StavrosK 4 hours ago [-]

This is exactly what www.codeshelter.co aims to do, please support us by joining.

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pjmlp 6 hours ago [-]

This will keep going on, until FOSS community accepts that beyond university projects, someone pumping up their CVs, having a company sponsorship, or being able to pimp it up with some kind of subscription/consulting, there is little to no money to be made and everyone has bills to pay.

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pjc50 4 hours ago [-]

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.

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mr__y 2 hours ago [-]

>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 time it needs to get widely adopted and popular (or the very possibility that it will not happen at all)

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DagAgren 4 hours ago [-]

But every person, sensible or not, has bills to pay. When you say "no sensible person goes into FOSS for the money" you are saying "most people can't afford to actively maintain a FOSS project", and you really can't claim that is in any way good for FOSS.

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roenxi 3 hours ago [-]

That doesn't sound like much of a change from the last 30 years. FOSS has done fine so far.

Really the only thing that might work is if there was broad community acceptance of not changing all the lower parts of the software stack all the time so the maintenance burden is lower.

Honestly; if we were interested in what was good for FOSS all that needs to happen is that hardware stops improving all the time. Then everyone can calm down, declare things finished and move on without requirements changing. The Linux graphic system (c.f. Xorg v. Wayland) still hasn't finished adjusting to graphics cards. That sort of change is bad for FOSS.

In a sense, this sort of thing is what is being showcased here. The breaking changes to FUSE are probably going to be linked to design changes in Catalina triggered by RAM/CPU/Network changes and the RPM/SSD transition that has been going on for however long. When that sort of thing subsides in 50 years there is going to be this amazing FOSS renaissance as working things stop breaking because of hardware changes and the balance really tilts towards free & available software.

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pjmlp 2 hours ago [-]

Really fine, maybe next year we get the FOSS desktop.

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jeltz 1 hour ago [-]

So what? Maybe FOSS cannot get us a competitive modern desktop, but in many areas open source projects have virtually eliminated all proprietary competition. Linux is running everywhere these days and e.g. in databases it is among the open source options where the growth is. Does FOSS need to be able to solve all software problems in the world for you to count it as successful?

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pjmlp 15 minutes ago [-]

Only if by everywhere you mean cloud centers, where the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft have their golden eggs not shared with the community.

If you are going to mention ChromeOS or Android, ChromeOS is hardly a blip outside US school system, and what kernel is being used on Android is irrelevant to user space, there is Fuschia on the horizon and Google has been replacing everything, with the Linux kernel being the last piece of GPL code standing.

Then if you mean embedded, plenty of IoT OS are MIT based and even Linux Foundation now has Zephyr as alternative to Linux, all operating systems where OEM can profit without giving anything back.

If you mean compilers, plenty of embedded OEMs are now happy LLVM users free of contributions, while reducing their development costs.

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hombre_fatal 2 hours ago [-]