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Likely the 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 projec

Likely the 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 https://github.com/osxfuse/osxfuse/graphs/contributors [2] https://github.com/osxfuse/osxfuse/issues/590#issuecomment-508021742 https://github.com/osxfuse/osxfuse/issues/590#issuecomment-5... [3] https://github.com/osxfuse/osxfuse/issues/590#issuecomment-501809602 https://github.com/osxfuse/osxfuse/issues/590#issuecomment-5...

pjmlp 7y 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.
- coldtea 7y ago
  That said, the FOSS community has created bigger companies and made bigger money than some of your favourite commercial projects (proprietary compilers, etc).
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    Like LLVM, which everyone is using to replace GCC, so that they are able to profit without contribution thanks MIT?
    - samatman 7y ago
      I would hazard that that main reason that many (by no means all) FOSS projects are migrating to LLVM is that clang is dramatically easier to work on, and at or over parity in efficiency of output.
    - beefhash 7y ago
      They changed to Apache 2.0 recently, actually.
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      Not everyone is replacing GCC with LLVM, and it’s being relicensed under Apache anyways.
    - coldtea 7y ago
      First, why should they contribute? You make it sound like a problem for the FOSS guys being exploited, but the choice of license is usually made explicitly to allow third parties to profit from their project without the burden of contribution. Second, despite not having to contribute, license while, LLVM has still seen so much contribution from big companies (Apple for one) that the whole argument is moot. Third, I meant companies like RedHat, or projects like Mongo, MySQL and others -- far more successful money-wise than most niche commercial compilers the kind that you appear to be a fan of while deriding FOSS for not making money...
      - pjmlp 7y ago
        The niche commercial compilers I tend to love, happen to have a positive income of several decades, allowing their employees happy lives. Hardly something that most LLVM FOSS contributors not on university research budgets can enjoy.
- syshum 7y ago
  the Libre Software community understands this, which is one of the reasons we push for the Use of Copy-Left licenses, and not Permissive licenses. So something like what happened here is not even possible. If the FUSE project on OSX would have been GPL from the beginning this person would not be able to change the licensing since he originally forked it, unless he rewrote all of the GPL code in a clean room rewrite which is not really realistic
  - chinesempire 7y ago
    If it was GPL from the beginning, wouldn't it be a "ZFS on Linux" like situation? I don't think you can legally distribute GPL kernel modules for non GPL kernels. Even if you linked the module to the Darwin code, which is released under an OSS license (APSL), the two are not compatible and it's not clear if redistribution is fine (see "Darling: macOS compatibility for Linux")
    - trasz 7y ago
      Sure you can. FreeBSD has been doing it for ages.
      - chinesempire 7y ago
        FreeBSD has a license compatible with GPL. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#FreeBSD https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#FreeBSD MacOS XNU doesn't. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#apsl2 https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#apsl2
        trasz 7y ago
        And how’s that relevant? Another example would be the closed source VMWare ESX, which is definitely not GPL-compatible.
        chinesempire 7y ago
        It is relevant because you can't legally distribute GPL code linked to non-gpl compatible code. In fact VMWare and FSF/SFC have been fighting over it for the past 10 years. Even though the court dismissed the claim, VMWare announced that will remove the code in question (https://www.vmware.com/company/news/updates/march-2019-hellwig-legal-proceedings.html https://www.vmware.com/company/news/updates/march-2019-hellw...) You can read more about it here https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/03/09/0423243/vmware-touts-dismissal-of-linux-gpl-lawsuit https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/03/09/0423243/vmware-tou... In fact VMWare realese the source code of their drivers (among the other things) because they are licensed under the GPL https://www.vmware.com/download/open_source.html https://www.vmware.com/download/open_source.html And maintains the repositories on Github with much of the GPL code they use https://github.com/vmware https://github.com/vmware
- f1refly 7y ago
  No, this wouldn't have been a problem if the software had been gpl licensed, as the companies would've been forced to give back whatever they changed themselfes, potentially helping him out a lot
  - javajosh 7y ago
    You cannot pay rent with 3rd party code contributions.
    - mikorym 7y ago
      The point he is making is that FOSS as an idea is independent from OP's post and thus not necessarily influenced by it.
    - dspillett 7y ago
      But you might be able to pay rent with it if those not wanting to feed back their work wanted the code enough to negotiate a paid licence under other terms. That can be messy for projects with many past maintainers where the licence options at the time of individual contributions did not explicitly allow this or arbitrary relicensing, but in this case (single current maintainer, other contributions made under a licence that allows him to do this) it needn't be.
      - javajosh 7y ago
        I'm not sure how that works, legally. If I understand you, you're suggesting that you can GPL your work to create leverage in a future negotiation with a potential user who wants to modify it privately and/or integrate it into proprietary software. Can you un-GPL your work for a single entity? Doesn't that mean that you yourself are violating the GPL? I'm legitimately asking, not being rhetorical.
        beering 7y ago
        If you're the sole author of the code (or own the copyright or have the ability to relicense), then you can. It's not "un-GPL"ing the code because whatever you GPL'd will continue to be available under the GPL forever. But you can say, hey, I'm ALSO releasing this code under a separate commercial license that costs $X dollars to get. You can't infringe on your own copyright!
- hannob 7y ago
  I'm really curious, what do you want the FOSS community exactly to accept and what would the outcome be? There are some FOSS business models. Sometimes they work. Sometimes they don't. Overall there's more FOSS than ever before, it's an amazingly successful concept. It doesn't always work, some projects and companies fail or decide to stop being FOSS. That doesn't change the fact that it's an amazingly successful concept.
  - fauigerzigerk 7y ago
    I think the concept hasn't been as successful as some had hoped for when it comes to moving power and control over software away from big corporations towards users. As an anti-capitalist movement/dream, open source has utterly failed. As a concept that has provided lots of opportunities for developers and startups it has been a great success.
    - baq 7y ago
      Agreed. The GPL has been a great success, so much so it's been banned by capitalists in their organizations with the result of dying pretty much everywhere except the kernel, GNU userland and an occasional dual licensed fully enterprise-copyrighted software. BSD with its take it and run with it approach enables people to make a living by modifying (or selling unmodified) software. The situation is dire especially in the internet non-core-router infrastructure.
      - jeltz 7y ago
        Personally I mostly associate GPL with capitalism, due to almost all projects controlled by a single for profit company using GPL while community and hobbyist projects more often tend to use BSD/MIT/Apache.
        saagarjha 7y ago
        > almost all projects controlled by a single for profit company using GPL Which ones? The two flagship ones I can think of for GPL, Linux and GCC, don’t really have one company in control of them. And on the flip side LLVM and the browser engines, which are arguably under reasonably strong control of one or two companies, are usually Apache or similar.
- pjc50 7y 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.
  - DagAgren 7y 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.
    - pjc50 7y ago
      "Most people can't afford to actively maintain a FOSS project" has always been true. It has been a hobby for some, a privilege allowed by the workplaces of others, and in a few rare cases companies have been built that charge for consulting and manage to fund a distro or other project that way. Or dual-license tech like Trolltech.
      - DagAgren 7y ago
        Yes, and I am saying that is not a great thing for FOSS.
        krageon 7y ago
        Why isn't it a great thing for FOSS? It is what FOSS is, and FOSS is in a pretty great place right now.
        DagAgren 7y ago
        Is it? Which part of the FOSS ideology or principles says that it's about doing things in your free time that you don't get paid for?
        7y ago
- II2II 7y ago
  If the end goal is earning an income, sure. Yet there are other reasons to adopt an open source model. It is useful as a collaborative model. For that to happen, people have to be willing to submit code and the maintainer has to be willing to accept code. It sounds like that was not happening here.
  - ivebeenthere 7y ago
    He is not getting any contributions. It would need a Mac kernel expert to fix most bugs anyway.
- krageon 7y ago
  > FOSS community accepts I know a lot of FOSS contributors but have never met one IRL that seriously believes there is money in it. Outside of people on internet platforms (that by and large aren't to be taken seriously to begin with), have you encountered real zealots like this? I doubt that they exist in truly great numbers.
- wayoutthere 7y ago
  Absolutely -- sustainability requires there to be money involved. Honestly, the only model that seems to work in the long-term is corporate-backed OSS where maintainers are paid a salary. Professionalism endures long after the passion has faded.
kakwa_ 7y 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.
- StavrosK 7y ago
  This is exactly what www.codeshelter.co aims to do, please support us by joining.
- indigochill 7y 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.
- blablabla123 7y ago
  I wouldn't mind if there was a "DONATE" button, I'd certainly donate 5$ or 10$. Under these circumstances even more since this driver is unique and several other drivers I use depend on it. (sshfs, perkeep, ext4fuse, ...) Probably these small but frequently used projects should also be supported by the FSF, at least in the *GPL case.
  - 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
andy098 7y ago
> Likely the best outcome for the project barring company sponsorship that pays him to continue working on it as OSS. The project page on github mentions two sponsors though, Boxcryptor and Editshare. I don´t know any of the story behind this though, just tought I should mention it.
lambda 7y ago
> He's been the sole maintainer on the project since 2012 [1] and has never been compensated for it I have to object to that. I work for a company which pays him to build branded versions of FUSE for macOS, and has been doing so for several years. He does reliably ship us new builds, but it has sometimes been a little difficult to get him to respond to feature requests or even patches that we send him. I don't believe that he is scaling much better with his commercial licensing than he was as a FLOSS maintainer. As it is, we're fairly happy with his work to continue to support new versions of macOS, which is fairly hard to ship systems software on these days (the code signing and notarization requirements keep getting more and more onerous, system integrity protection keeps getting in the way of debugging, and so on), but it would be nice if we weren't limited to a single person working on the project. I'd really rather he kept the project open source, and continued to provide custom builds for companies on a contract basis. Due to the difficulties of building and signing the kernel extension across all of the versions of macOS that it supports, just having the source available but keeping the binaries under a proprietary license would probably be sufficient to make it worth the while of most companies to license with him to provide custom builds like we do.
- cmcd 7y ago
  How long has your company been working with him? It sounds like this change was made two years ago.
  - lambda 7y ago
    For about 3 years.
- ericd 7y ago
  Sounds like a lot of additional work for him to provide custom builds? Maybe he wants to be paid for the core product development that provides most of the value?
  - lambda 7y ago
    No, the custom builds aren't much more work than the vanilla builds, it's getting the build environment set up in the first place that's a pain, since you have to build against a different SDK for each version of macOS you support; and the custom builds are what he sells to customers, since with a custom build it can be installed and updated independently of the free-as-in-beer version that is used for things like SSHFS and might be updated out from under you in a way that breaks your application. Updating with your application means that you can test each new version and fix any issues or report back to him before shipping it.

pjmlp 7y 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.

coldtea 7y ago
That said, the FOSS community has created bigger companies and made bigger money than some of your favourite commercial projects (proprietary compilers, etc).
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Like LLVM, which everyone is using to replace GCC, so that they are able to profit without contribution thanks MIT?
  - samatman 7y ago
    I would hazard that that main reason that many (by no means all) FOSS projects are migrating to LLVM is that clang is dramatically easier to work on, and at or over parity in efficiency of output.
  - beefhash 7y ago
    They changed to Apache 2.0 recently, actually.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    Not everyone is replacing GCC with LLVM, and it’s being relicensed under Apache anyways.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    First, why should they contribute? You make it sound like a problem for the FOSS guys being exploited, but the choice of license is usually made explicitly to allow third parties to profit from their project without the burden of contribution. Second, despite not having to contribute, license while, LLVM has still seen so much contribution from big companies (Apple for one) that the whole argument is moot. Third, I meant companies like RedHat, or projects like Mongo, MySQL and others -- far more successful money-wise than most niche commercial compilers the kind that you appear to be a fan of while deriding FOSS for not making money...
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      The niche commercial compilers I tend to love, happen to have a positive income of several decades, allowing their employees happy lives. Hardly something that most LLVM FOSS contributors not on university research budgets can enjoy.
syshum 7y ago
the Libre Software community understands this, which is one of the reasons we push for the Use of Copy-Left licenses, and not Permissive licenses. So something like what happened here is not even possible. If the FUSE project on OSX would have been GPL from the beginning this person would not be able to change the licensing since he originally forked it, unless he rewrote all of the GPL code in a clean room rewrite which is not really realistic
- chinesempire 7y ago
  If it was GPL from the beginning, wouldn't it be a "ZFS on Linux" like situation? I don't think you can legally distribute GPL kernel modules for non GPL kernels. Even if you linked the module to the Darwin code, which is released under an OSS license (APSL), the two are not compatible and it's not clear if redistribution is fine (see "Darling: macOS compatibility for Linux")
  - trasz 7y ago
    Sure you can. FreeBSD has been doing it for ages.
    - chinesempire 7y ago
      FreeBSD has a license compatible with GPL. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#FreeBSD https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#FreeBSD MacOS XNU doesn't. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#apsl2 https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#apsl2
      - trasz 7y ago
        And how’s that relevant? Another example would be the closed source VMWare ESX, which is definitely not GPL-compatible.
        chinesempire 7y ago
        It is relevant because you can't legally distribute GPL code linked to non-gpl compatible code. In fact VMWare and FSF/SFC have been fighting over it for the past 10 years. Even though the court dismissed the claim, VMWare announced that will remove the code in question (https://www.vmware.com/company/news/updates/march-2019-hellwig-legal-proceedings.html https://www.vmware.com/company/news/updates/march-2019-hellw...) You can read more about it here https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/03/09/0423243/vmware-touts-dismissal-of-linux-gpl-lawsuit https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/03/09/0423243/vmware-tou... In fact VMWare realese the source code of their drivers (among the other things) because they are licensed under the GPL https://www.vmware.com/download/open_source.html https://www.vmware.com/download/open_source.html And maintains the repositories on Github with much of the GPL code they use https://github.com/vmware https://github.com/vmware
f1refly 7y ago
No, this wouldn't have been a problem if the software had been gpl licensed, as the companies would've been forced to give back whatever they changed themselfes, potentially helping him out a lot
- javajosh 7y ago
  You cannot pay rent with 3rd party code contributions.
  - mikorym 7y ago
    The point he is making is that FOSS as an idea is independent from OP's post and thus not necessarily influenced by it.
  - dspillett 7y ago
    But you might be able to pay rent with it if those not wanting to feed back their work wanted the code enough to negotiate a paid licence under other terms. That can be messy for projects with many past maintainers where the licence options at the time of individual contributions did not explicitly allow this or arbitrary relicensing, but in this case (single current maintainer, other contributions made under a licence that allows him to do this) it needn't be.
    - javajosh 7y ago
      I'm not sure how that works, legally. If I understand you, you're suggesting that you can GPL your work to create leverage in a future negotiation with a potential user who wants to modify it privately and/or integrate it into proprietary software. Can you un-GPL your work for a single entity? Doesn't that mean that you yourself are violating the GPL? I'm legitimately asking, not being rhetorical.
      - beering 7y ago
        If you're the sole author of the code (or own the copyright or have the ability to relicense), then you can. It's not "un-GPL"ing the code because whatever you GPL'd will continue to be available under the GPL forever. But you can say, hey, I'm ALSO releasing this code under a separate commercial license that costs $X dollars to get. You can't infringe on your own copyright!
hannob 7y ago
I'm really curious, what do you want the FOSS community exactly to accept and what would the outcome be? There are some FOSS business models. Sometimes they work. Sometimes they don't. Overall there's more FOSS than ever before, it's an amazingly successful concept. It doesn't always work, some projects and companies fail or decide to stop being FOSS. That doesn't change the fact that it's an amazingly successful concept.
- fauigerzigerk 7y ago
  I think the concept hasn't been as successful as some had hoped for when it comes to moving power and control over software away from big corporations towards users. As an anti-capitalist movement/dream, open source has utterly failed. As a concept that has provided lots of opportunities for developers and startups it has been a great success.
  - baq 7y ago
    Agreed. The GPL has been a great success, so much so it's been banned by capitalists in their organizations with the result of dying pretty much everywhere except the kernel, GNU userland and an occasional dual licensed fully enterprise-copyrighted software. BSD with its take it and run with it approach enables people to make a living by modifying (or selling unmodified) software. The situation is dire especially in the internet non-core-router infrastructure.
    - jeltz 7y ago
      Personally I mostly associate GPL with capitalism, due to almost all projects controlled by a single for profit company using GPL while community and hobbyist projects more often tend to use BSD/MIT/Apache.
      - saagarjha 7y ago
        > almost all projects controlled by a single for profit company using GPL Which ones? The two flagship ones I can think of for GPL, Linux and GCC, don’t really have one company in control of them. And on the flip side LLVM and the browser engines, which are arguably under reasonably strong control of one or two companies, are usually Apache or similar.
pjc50 7y 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.
- DagAgren 7y 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.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    "Most people can't afford to actively maintain a FOSS project" has always been true. It has been a hobby for some, a privilege allowed by the workplaces of others, and in a few rare cases companies have been built that charge for consulting and manage to fund a distro or other project that way. Or dual-license tech like Trolltech.
    - DagAgren 7y ago
      Yes, and I am saying that is not a great thing for FOSS.
      - krageon 7y ago
        Why isn't it a great thing for FOSS? It is what FOSS is, and FOSS is in a pretty great place right now.
        DagAgren 7y ago
        Is it? Which part of the FOSS ideology or principles says that it's about doing things in your free time that you don't get paid for?
        7y ago
II2II 7y ago
If the end goal is earning an income, sure. Yet there are other reasons to adopt an open source model. It is useful as a collaborative model. For that to happen, people have to be willing to submit code and the maintainer has to be willing to accept code. It sounds like that was not happening here.
- ivebeenthere 7y ago
  He is not getting any contributions. It would need a Mac kernel expert to fix most bugs anyway.
krageon 7y ago
> FOSS community accepts I know a lot of FOSS contributors but have never met one IRL that seriously believes there is money in it. Outside of people on internet platforms (that by and large aren't to be taken seriously to begin with), have you encountered real zealots like this? I doubt that they exist in truly great numbers.
wayoutthere 7y ago
Absolutely -- sustainability requires there to be money involved. Honestly, the only model that seems to work in the long-term is corporate-backed OSS where maintainers are paid a salary. Professionalism endures long after the passion has faded.

kakwa_ 7y 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.

StavrosK 7y ago
This is exactly what www.codeshelter.co aims to do, please support us by joining.
indigochill 7y 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.
blablabla123 7y ago
I wouldn't mind if there was a "DONATE" button, I'd certainly donate 5$ or 10$. Under these circumstances even more since this driver is unique and several other drivers I use depend on it. (sshfs, perkeep, ext4fuse, ...) Probably these small but frequently used projects should also be supported by the FSF, at least in the *GPL case.
- 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

andy098 7y ago

> Likely the best outcome for the project barring company sponsorship that pays him to continue working on it as OSS. The project page on github mentions two sponsors though, Boxcryptor and Editshare. I don´t know any of the story behind this though, just tought I should mention it.

lambda 7y ago

> He's been the sole maintainer on the project since 2012 [1] and has never been compensated for it I have to object to that. I work for a company which pays him to build branded versions of FUSE for macOS, and has been doing so for several years. He does reliably ship us new builds, but it has sometimes been a little difficult to get him to respond to feature requests or even patches that we send him. I don't believe that he is scaling much better with his commercial licensing than he was as a FLOSS maintainer. As it is, we're fairly happy with his work to continue to support new versions of macOS, which is fairly hard to ship systems software on these days (the code signing and notarization requirements keep getting more and more onerous, system integrity protection keeps getting in the way of debugging, and so on), but it would be nice if we weren't limited to a single person working on the project. I'd really rather he kept the project open source, and continued to provide custom builds for companies on a contract basis. Due to the difficulties of building and signing the kernel extension across all of the versions of macOS that it supports, just having the source available but keeping the binaries under a proprietary license would probably be sufficient to make it worth the while of most companies to license with him to provide custom builds like we do.

cmcd 7y ago
How long has your company been working with him? It sounds like this change was made two years ago.
- lambda 7y ago
  For about 3 years.
ericd 7y ago
Sounds like a lot of additional work for him to provide custom builds? Maybe he wants to be paid for the core product development that provides most of the value?
- lambda 7y ago
  No, the custom builds aren't much more work than the vanilla builds, it's getting the build environment set up in the first place that's a pain, since you have to build against a different SDK for each version of macOS you support; and the custom builds are what he sells to customers, since with a custom build it can be installed and updated independently of the free-as-in-beer version that is used for things like SSHFS and might be updated out from under you in a way that breaks your application. Updating with your application means that you can test each new version and fix any issues or report back to him before shipping it.