Why is it not enough to give you all of their code for free? Why do they also have obligations and expectations beyond that? The entitlement never ends!

> At work the trend is only adopt open source on a paid plan, adopting or relying on open source otherwise is just waiting for the rug to be pulled.

"Won't do free labour for our commercial enterprise to profit off of forever" is a rug pull now? It's incredible that you can type these words with a straight face.

▲

teruakohatu a day ago | parent | next [-]

> "Won't do free labour for our commercial enterprise to profit off of forever" is a rug pull now? It's incredible that you can type these words with a straight face.

I explicitly stated in my comment that we pay for open source (via vendor support). That is not the issue.

It is now a common business strategy to commercialise an open source project. FreeNAS was commercialised as TrueNAS, which is now having some of the source pulled.

TrueNAS doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s built on source projects.

	▲	applfanboysbgon a day ago \| parent [-]
		> I explicitly stated in my comment that we pay for open source (via vendor support). That is not the issue. Your statements clearly took issue with the fact that your company has to pay open-source devs whose work it uses for reliability. You presented the options as "pay them, or else get rugpulled", and then went on to say "how did we end up in this state of affairs [where we must pay to not get rugpulled]". There is no possible way to interpret your comment other than lamenting the "state of affairs". > TrueNAS doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s built on source projects. As long as it isn't violating the license of those projects, they still don't owe anyone anything. If it is violating the license, complain about it on those terms. But your complaint was about open-source in general, not specifically only this project.

▲

ssl-3 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'll bite.

They're allowed to stop publishing new work whenever they want to. That's part of the free, open-source software game, wherein: We're all free to provide as much as we wish, and also free to consume as much as we want. Nobody necessarily owes anyone else anything and it's really very beautiful in these ways. This is enabled in large part due to the very low cost of distributing copies of intangible software (which can be very close to zero).

But when money gets involved, then things become different. Contracts can be had. Support requirements can be determined. If a contract requires 5 years of support, then it can be reasonably expected for support to continue for at least 5 years.

It's OK to want that, and to never use software that doesn't involve money. It's also OK for an author/company/org to not want that, and to never agree to those terms.

These are different goals, but one party doing it one way doesn't detract from another party doing it some other way. It's all OK.

▲

Brian_K_White a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They do not give all of the code. If you have an object, and don't have everything needed to reproduce the object, then you have not been given the source to the object.

And with BSD licenced code this is their right.

And it's my and anyone else's right to observe all of this and criticize it.

▲

applfanboysbgon a day ago | parent [-]

Likewise, it is my right to criticise you for exercising your right to criticise them. Nobody said you aren't allowed to, but just as anyone is allowed to whine about not being given enough free stuff, I'm allowed to call out that they're acting like an entitled child in public. Just because you can legally do something doesn't mean that it is socially acceptable to do so.

▲

Brian_K_White 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

No one is whining about not being given enough free stuff, and you in fact have no right to criticize people for something they aren't doing.

For my part, I'm simply opting for "leave it" out of "take it or leave it". I merely say WHY I'm leaving it, but choosing to use something else rather than reward trunas for doing something I don't like is not whining or demanding or childish.

Here is childish: You can go fuck yourself for attempting to characterize it that way.

Now you have something to criticize dickface.

Wow, that was easy, it's almost like calling people names is effortless and we can all do that, and not a very valid argument.

▲

ThePowerOfFuet a day ago | parent | prev [-]

They chose to base their enterprise on the work of others, only to pull the ladder up behind them.

Fuck that noise. They are the ones breaking the social contract, not the folks criticizing them for it.

Shameful of you.

▲

tw04 20 hours ago | parent [-]

> They chose to base their enterprise on the work of others, only to pull the ladder up behind them.

This is literally why BSD exists in the first place. To allow companies compete freedom with the code, including freedom to not release changes.

I hate to break it to you: basically every commercial storage vendor on the planet bases their appliances on either BSD or Linux and not a single one is sharing their proprietary code with you. There’s nothing shameful about it, they built a company to make money.

	▲	bigstrat2003 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> This is literally why BSD exists in the first place. To allow companies compete freedom with the code, including freedom to not release changes. I would phrase it slightly differently. BSD licensing exists to allow everyone complete freedom with the code, not just businesses. It is a gift to the commons without restriction on who may use it or for what, which is why I love BSD (and other permissive licenses).

▲

president_zippy a day ago | parent | prev [-]

You didn't deserve to be downvoted to hell and back. People deserve to be paid for their work, and without copyright law only mega-cap companies would ever be able to capture enough value from their work to survive.

People act like you're saying Disney should be able to hold a copyright on Mickey Mouse for over 100 years.

Calling it a "rug pull" when the creator of an open source project decides to stop giving away future work for free is a delusional level of self-entitlement.

(1) The previous releases are still open source. If you don't like it, fork the last free release and maintain it yourself.

(2) People deserve whatever the market is willing to pay for their work. See above.

Frankly, if D. Richard Hipp decided to stop giving away future versions of SQLite for free, I would be the first person to congratulate him for finally having the courage to put his foot down and say "my fellow committers and I deserve at least a few million dollars for 20 years of work making something that billions of machines rely upon."

▲

roryirvine 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

An ironic choice of hypothetical given that SQLite's present ubiquity is a result of a very similar licensing rug-pull on the part of Berkeley DB, after Sleepycat's acquisition by Oracle.

And, in turn, bdb gained prominence on the back of AT&T claiming copyright on ndbm during the Unix Wars.

So there's a long history of this, and plenty of precedents which suggest that such a move would make very little money and would likely result in a better alternative quickly rising to take its place.

I suspect that Hipp understands this, and is unlikely to do anything of the sort.

▲

mightyham 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Open-source is an inherently radical anti-capitalist philosophy. In your eyes everyone "deserves" what the market is willing to pay, but open-source developers would rather donate their time and energy to create or contribute to something that is freely accessible to anyone and everyone. Also, believe it or not, but some people are not motivated by money, and actually derive value from the process of creating software.

The issue with rug-pulls like this is that they are deceptively masquerading with this philosophy as a calculated business strategy to adopt users. Then in this case they start using deceptive tactics like removing build files so they can continue appearing to be fully open source, even though they are violating the spirit of that term. Finally, they drop the facade when it is deemed valuable enough. Even if you are a strict capitalist, there is nothing virtuous or meritocratic about these kinds of business strategies, they rely on tricky, concealed intentions, and rightfully deserve criticism.

I'll also add that there is nothing "courageous" about deciding to extract more value from your labor at the expense of public accessibility. True courage is found in acts of selfless sacrifice.

▲

bigstrat2003 16 hours ago | parent [-]

> Open-source is an inherently radical anti-capitalist philosophy.

No it isn't. Open source isn't inherently political in any way. Maybe that's what it's about to you, but I open source things because I want to give to others out of a general sense of wishing to build up the whole community. I don't have anything against capitalism.

▲

mightyham 16 hours ago | parent [-]

First off, in some sense everything is political. Next, I am not claiming that you can't be supporter of open source while also holding a wide array of associated political views. My point is that the concept of open source fundamentally rejects the ideal capitalist conception of the world as a bunch of purely rational self-interested agents seeking to optimize wealth and economic output. Willingly performing labor for its own sake, for the benefit of others, with no expectation of return value, is obviously not capitalist behavior.

	▲	president_zippy 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		"First off, in some sense everything is political." That's what every partisan hack says before they shove their culture war politics down your throat. Some people out in the real world get laid and just can't be bothered to hear your opinion about the race-swapped Snow White remake, regardless of whether you loved it or hated it.

▲

pstuart 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I effectively agree with you, but your last comment is interesting in the usage of the word "courage". My understanding of D. Richard Hipp's state of being is that he feels fairly financially compensated (via support contracts), and more so, emotionally compensated by knowing that his work adds value to other people's lives and having value in that.

Money's a good thing to have, but having purpose in life is incredibly valuable too.

▲

president_zippy 12 hours ago | parent [-]

Fair enough on use of the word "courage" in this case. I will gladly walk back on things I am wrong about when I realize it. If DRH prefers the business model of giving away something for free and selling consulting support for it, then bully for him. It might result in less income, but I'm sure being a consultant is lot less stressful than running a corporation based on SQLite with >200 employees would be.

However, I will not devalue the work of software engineering by giving away solutions to difficult problems for free and fostering a culture of self-entitlement toward software engineers. Treating prosperous and purposeful existences as conflicting aspirations is an unusually pernicious self-deception. Go get yours, I want you to get paid for your work. You deserve to get paid for the value you create.

Besides that, it's naive to think that if you give up the portion of value you can capture, that it will go back to the people you're really trying to help. In reality, when you publish really good open source work that mega-cap tech companies can use at scale, they are the ones who capture the lion's share of the value you created rather than the end users they are data mining.

"Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn." -Deuteronomy 25:4

If even Jews and Christians- for as much as the self-abasing communists on this site resent them- can concede that even a lowly beast of the field is entitled to a portion of the value it creates, then how much more deserving is dignified man of his recompense?

▲

pstuart 9 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm not contesting the need to be compensated for work.

My point is that there's stuff that I have worked on to scratch an itch and don't feel the need for monetary compensation. I believe there's an intrinsic need to be part of something bigger than ones self, and participating by volunteering time to have the satisfaction of knowing that you helped make something you care about better is not a bad thing, if on your own terms.

The way DRH has talked about SQLite is that he is financially secure and by giving it away gets both the reward mentioned above as well as maintaining the value of the free software which he can still make money off of support contracts. He is choosing to do this because for him that effort is the most rewarding.

FOSS has been a foundational facet of the work we get well-paid to participate in. This is a case in which we have the option to have our cake and share it too.

None of this means you have to participate in this way, but I suggest that your viewpoint is yours and may not be shared by everybody else in the community.

▲

president_zippy 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm working on something I plan to give away for free as well. I'm backporting request multiplexing into HTTP/1, calling it HTTP/1.2, and working on updates to a few HTTP servers that rejected HTTP/2 and HTTP/3. I wrote my RFC draft first to really hammer out the edge cases before I go in blind on the implementation. I just finished the RFC draft 2 days ago and it took 9 pages, but the code changes in my estimation will be no more than 300 LOC for every existing HTTP/1.1 implementation I fork. My protocol adds one header to correlate a response and its originating request, and defines a new transfer encoding scheme that's just "chunked", with the the request ID in each chunk. It's simple stuff: I just want to multiplex request handling without having to adopt a binary protocol with a complex state for each request-response pair.

I'm not doing it because I'm Bill Maher and I'm offering the solutions to all of society's problems for free. I'm doing it because I want an HTTP server that does just what I need to do and is not a pain in my ass for my small set of use cases. I've use OpenBSD and its httpd for a couple years now, and I want to fix the only real problem I have with it because I know it's not hard to do. If they won't take my change, the worst they can do is say no and leave me to maintain my own fork in perpetuity.

As for group identity, giving altruistically and being part of something bigger than oneself are completely separate if you really dig into it. Those young women who joined Charles Manson's murder cult were certainly part of something bigger than themselves, while self-employed people who donate a portion of their wealth or adopt children out of the infamous foster care system are not.

I'm not saying group identity is necessarily bad, I'm just making my case that it's neither good nor bad. I would make the case for individualism as paradoxically foundational to creating the kind of society that creates people of stronger moral character, but that's just idle and unprofitable philosophizing, and any schmuck can wax philosophical and sound intelligently profound.

"If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life." -Henry David Thoreau

	▲	pstuart 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		What you're doing almost requires giving it away as it only has value if other people use it. One small nit: "group identity". I have no tribe, no group (alas). The only tribe I can lay claim to is humanity itself. I'm at a point in my life where one tends to ponder the value of one's actions in the scant time left to act. I try to acknowledge the nihilism that whatever I do will be forgotten in short order, but while I'm here I may have the opportunity to somehow "make the world a better place". Life's funny that way. I wish you luck with your project and thank you for engaging in depth with me.