| ▲ | StopDisinfo910 7 hours 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. |
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| ▲ | rpdillon an hour ago | parent | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | growse 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It's a social contract, which for many people is a moral contract. |
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| ▲ | PKop 16 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | 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? | |
| ▲ | kube-system an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | No, social contracts require some sort of mutual benefit. | |
| ▲ | 627467 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Show me a FOSS license where a commitment to indefinite maintenance is promised. | | |
| ▲ | account42 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Social contracts are typically unwritten so the license would be the wrong place to look for it. | | |
| ▲ | skeledrew 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | If it's neither written nor explicitly spoken, then it's not a contract of any kind. It's just an - usually naive - expectation. | | |
| ▲ | account42 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | A social contract isn't a legal contract to begin with, but even for those "written or explicitly spoken" is not a hard requirement. | | |
| ▲ | skeledrew 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | A social contract still has to be explicit in some way to be considered such. Otherwise it's just an accepted convention. |
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| ▲ | dbacar 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It was not expectation when they started, did a lot to lure many into the ecosystem. When you release it free, wait for the momentum to build, then you cut off, it is something else. And the worse is they did it in a very short time. Check out elasticsearch, the same route but did not abandon the 7 release like this. | | |
| ▲ | skeledrew an hour ago | parent [-] | | I know all about ElasticSearch, MongoDB, Redis, etc. Yes, what they did sucks. No, it doesn't make the maintainers bad or anything. It's still on the user to know that anything can happen to that spiffy project they've been using for a while, and so be prepared to migrate at any time. |
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| ▲ | PKop 12 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Social contracts are typically unwritten Maybe this is the case, but why is your presumption of entitlement to free labor of others the assumed social contract, the assumed "moral" position, rather than the immoral one? Why is the assumed social contract that is unwritten not that you can have the free labor we've released to you so far, but we owe you nothing in the future? There's too much assumption of the premise that "moral" and "social contract" are terms that make the entitled demands of free-loaders the good guys in this debate. Maybe the better "morality" is the selfless workers giving away the product of their labor for free are the actual good guys. |
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| ▲ | StopDisinfo910 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | growse 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The social contract is found (and implicitly negotiated) in the interactions between humans, ie: society. | | |
| ▲ | antonvs 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Sounds like you've misunderstood this particular social contract. Luckily several people in this thread have corrected you. |
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| ▲ | account42 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Where is the contract to return the shopping cart to the corral? | | |
| ▲ | bee_rider 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I always preferred people who didn’t, when I worked in retail. It generates a nice chill task (wander around the parking lot looking for carts). But if you want to do a favor for the faceless retailer, go for it. Mostly I chuck my cart in the corral to get it out of my way, but this sees more like a morally-neutral action to me. | |
| ▲ | StopDisinfo910 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Your analogy doesn't make sense. You are getting benefits from using the shopping cart and you bring back as it's expected as part of the exchange. You bring the cart back to where you took which is a low effort commitment entirely proportional to what you got from it. Free software developers are gifting you something. Expecting indefinite free work is not mutual respect. That's entitlement. The common is still there. You have the code. Open source is not a perpetual service agreement. It is not indentured servitude to the community. Stop trying to guilt trip people into giving you free work. | | |
| ▲ | thayne an hour ago | parent [-] | | MinIO accepted contributions from people outside the company who did work on it for free, usually because they expected that minio would keep the software open source. | | |
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| ▲ | imtringued 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | In this context the social contract would be an expectation that specifically software developers must return the shopping cart for you, but you would never expect the same from cashiers, construction workers, etc. If the software developer doesn't return your cart, he betrayed the social contract. This sounds very manipulative and narcissistic. |
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| ▲ | PunchyHamster 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| it's still a bait and switch, considering they started removing features before the abandonment. |
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| ▲ | Ekaros 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Users can fork it from point they started removing features. Fully inside social, moral and spiritual contract of open source. |
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| ▲ | dangus 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | skeledrew 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | ghywertelling 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Make hay while the sun shines. Be glad that the project happened. | |
| ▲ | imtringued 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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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| ▲ | nubinetwork 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > bait and switch Is it really though? They're replacing one product with another, and the replacement comes with a free version. |
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