6 ms·

There's nothing wrong at all with charging for your product. What I do take issue with, however, is convincing everyone that your product is FOSS, waiting until

by jbstack 8mo ago

There's nothing wrong at all with charging for your product. What I do take issue with, however, is convincing everyone that your product is FOSS, waiting until people undertake a lot of work to integrate your product into their infrastructure, and then doing a bait-and-switch. Just be honest since the start that your product will eventually abandon its FOSS licence. Then people can make an informed decision. Or, if you haven't done that, do the right thing and continue to stand by what you originally promised.

vladms 8mo ago
Isn't this the normal sales anyhow for many products? One attracts a customer with unreasonable promises and features, makes him sign a deal to integrate, then issues appear once in production that make you realize you will need to invest more. When you start something (startup, FOSS project, damn even marriage) you might start with the best intentions and then you can learn/change/loose interest. I find it unreasonable to "demand" clarity "at the start" because there is no such thing. Turning it around, any company that adopts a FOSS project should be honest and pay for something if it does not accept the idea that at some point the project will change course (which obviously, does not guarantee much, because even if you pay for something they can decide to shut it down).
- praptak 8mo ago
  > I find it unreasonable to "demand" clarity "at the start" because there is no such thing. Obviously you cannot "demand" stuff but you can do your due dilligence as the person who chooses a technical solution. Some projects have more clarity than others, for example the Linux foundation or CNCF are basically companies sharing costs for stuff they all benefit from like Linux or Prometheus monitoring and it is highly unlikely they'd do a rug pull. On the other end of the spectrum there are companies with a "free" version of a paid product and the incentive to make the free product crappier so that people pay for the paid version. These should be avoided.
  - caniszczyk 8mo ago
    It's not only less likely to have rug pulls in open source foundations, it's not really possible. Some foundations like CNCF have stood up when companies even tried this: https://www.cncf.io/blog/2025/05/01/protecting-nats-and-the-integrity-of-open-source-cncfs-commitment-to-the-community/ https://www.cncf.io/blog/2025/05/01/protecting-nats-and-the-...
hiAndrewQuinn 8mo ago
>Just be honest since the start that your product will eventually abandon its FOSS licence. Then people can make an informed decision. "An informed decision" is not a black or white category, and it definitely isn't when we're talking about risk pricing for B2B services and goods, like what MinIO largely was for those who paid. Any business with financial modelling worth their salt knows that very few things which are good and free today will stay that way tomorrow. The leadership of a firm you transact with may or may not state this in words, but there are many other ways to infer the likelihood of this covertly by paying close attention. And, if you're not paying close attention, it's probably just not that important to your own product. What risks you consider worth tailing are a direct extension of how you view the world. The primary selling point of MinIO for many businesses was, "it's cheaper than AWS for our needs". That's probably still true for many businesses and so there's money to be made at least in the short term.
- berkes 8mo ago
  "Informed decisions" mean you need to have the information. Like with software development, we often lack the information on which we have to decide architectural, technical or business decisions. The common solution for that is to embrace this. Defer decisions. Make changing easy once you do receive the information. And build "getting information" into the fabric. We call this "Agile", "Lean", "data driven" and so on. I think this applies here too. Very big chance that MinIO team honestly thought that they'd keep it open source but only now gathered enough "information" to make this "informed decision".
adamcrow64 8mo ago
exactly
StopDisinfo910 8mo 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.
- growse 8mo ago
  It's a social contract, which for many people is a moral contract.
  - StopDisinfo910 8mo ago
    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.
    - account42 8mo ago
      Where is the contract to return the shopping cart to the corral?
      - StopDisinfo910 8mo ago
        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.
        8mo ago
puszczyk 8mo ago
> Just be honest since the start While I agree with the sentiment, keep in mind that circumstances change over the years. What made sense (and what you've believed in) a few years ago may be different now. This is especially true when it comes to business models.
- hirako2000 8mo ago
  When your product entered mainstream with integration that would yield millions when virtually obliged to get a license is typically what happens. When backed by a company there is an ethical obligation to keep, at least maintenance. Of course legally they can do what they wish. It isn't unfair to call it bad practice.
  - rofrol 8mo ago
    There is no ethical obligation. You just want them to release new work under open source licence.
    - hirako2000 8mo ago
      They already had. And for what purpose you think?
  - skeledrew 8mo ago
    There's no way that maintaining something is an ethical obligation, regardless of popularity. There is only legal obligation, for commercial products.
    - hirako2000 8mo ago
      If offering a tie in thing supposedly free of charge without warning that would end once it serves a party less profit purpose then yes. Ethics are not obligations, they are moral principles. Not having principles doesn't send you to prison that is why it isn't law. It makes you lose moral credit though.
jillesvangurp 8mo ago
It's part of the due diligence process for users to decide if they can trust a project. I use a few simple heuristics: - Evaluate who contributes regularly to a project. The more diverse this group is, the better. If it's a handful of individuals from 1 company, see other points. This doesn't have to be a show stopper. If it's a bit niche and only a handful of people contribute, you might want to think about what happens when these people stop doing that (like is happening here). - Look at required contributor agreements and license. A serious red flag here is if a single company can effectively decide to change the license at any point they want to. Major projects like Terraform, Redis, Elasticsearch (repeatedly), etc. have exercised that option. It can be very disruptive when that happens. - Evaluate the license allows you do what you need to do. Licenses like the AGPLv3 (which min.io used here) can be problematic on that front and comes with restrictions that corporate legal departments generally don't like. In the end choosing to use software is a business decision you take. Just make sure you understand what you are getting into and that this is OK with your company and compatible with business goals. - Permissive licenses (MIT, BSD, Apache, etc.) are popular with larger companies and widely used on Github. They facilitate a neutral ground for competitors to collaborate. One aspect you should be aware off is that the very feature that makes them popular also means that contributors can take the software and create modifications under a different license. They generally can't re-license existing software or retroactively. But companies like Elasticsearch have switched from Apache 2.0 to closed source, and recently to AGPLv3. Opensearch remains Apache 2.0 and has a thriving community at this point. - Look at the wider community behind a project. Who runs it; how professional are they (e.g. a foundation), etc. How likely would it be to survive something happening to the main company behind a thing? Companies tend to be less resilient than the open source projects they create over time. They fail, are subject to mergers and acquisitions, can end up in the hands of hedge funds, or big consulting companies like IBM. Many decades old OSS projects have survived multiple such events. Which makes them very safe bets. None of these points have to be decisive. If you really like a company, you might be willing to overlook their less than ideal licensing or other potential red flags. And some things are not that critical if you have to replace them. This is about assessing risk and balancing the tradeoff of value against that. Forks are always an option when bad things happen to projects. But that only works if there's a strong community capable of supporting such a fork and a license that makes that practical. The devil is in the details. When Redis announced their license change, the creation of Valkey was a foregone conclusion. There was just no way that wasn't going to happen. I think it only took a few months for the community to get organized around that. That's a good example of a good community.
devsda 8mo ago
Everyone is quick to assert rights granted by the license terms and fast to say the authors should have chosen a better license from the start in case the license doesnt fit the current situation. License terms don't end there. There is a no warranty clause too in almost every open source license and it is as important as the other parts of the license. There is no promise or guarantees for updates or future versions.
- direwolf20 8mo ago
  They're not saying they violated the license, they're saying they're assholes. It may not be illegal to say you'll do something for free and then not do it, but it's assholish, especially if you said it to gain customers.
  - rofrol 8mo ago
    They gave code for free, under open source, but you call them assholes if they do not release more code for free. So who is the asshole here? You or them?
    - direwolf20 8mo ago
      Nestle started a charity to give free baby formula to mothers in African villages. Once they all stopped producing milk, they stopped the charity and made the formula so expensive it was barely affordable.
  - skeledrew 8mo ago
    There's no broken promise though. It's the users who decide+assume, on their own going in, that X project is good for their needs and they'll have access to future versions in a way they're comfortable with. The developers just go along with the decision+assumption, and may choose to break it at any point. They'd only be assholes if they'd explicitly promised the project would unconditionally remain Y for perpetuity, which is a bs promise nobody should listen to, cuz life.
  - devsda 8mo ago
yread 8mo ago
Easy. If you see open source software maintained by a company, assume they will make it closed source or enshittify the free version. If it's maintained by an individual assume he will get bored with it. Plan accordingly. It may not happen and then you'll be pleasantly surprised
Someone 8mo ago
> What I do take issue with, however, is convincing everyone that your product is FOSS, waiting until people undertake a lot of work to integrate your product into their infrastructure, and then doing a bait-and-switch. But FOSS means “this particular set of source files is free to use and modify”. It doesn’t include “and we will forever keep developing and maintaining it forever for free”. It’s only different if people, in addition to the FOSS license, promise any further updates will be under the same license and then change course. And yes, there is a gray area where such a promise is sort-of implied, but even then, what do you prefer, the developers abandoning the project, or at least having the option of a paid-for version?
- ufocia 8mo ago
  > what do you prefer, the developers abandoning the project, or at least having the option of a paid-for version? It's not a binary choice. I prefer the developers releasing the software under a permissive license. I agree that relying on freemium maintenance is naive. The community source lives on, perhaps the community should fork and run with it for the common good absorbing the real costs of maintenance.
  - plagiarist 8mo ago
    Well, yes, that's the reason to use FOSS. Nobody can fully rug pull. But the worst case is still needing someone to take over on it.
j1elo 8mo ago
The only meaningful informed decision, but sadly much less known (and I think we should talk and insist more on it), is to be wary if you see a CLA. Not all do, but most perform Copyright Assignment, and that's detrimental to the long-term robustness of Open Source. Having a FOSS license is NOT enough. Idealy the copyright should be distributed across all contributors. That's the only way to make overall consensus a required step before relicensing (except for reimplementation). Pick FOSS projects without CLAs that perform Copyright Assignment to an untrusted entity (few exceptions apply, e.g. the FSF in the past)
- baq 8mo ago
  Bad advice. You should be wary always. CLA or not, nothing guarantees that the project you depend on will receive updates, not even if you pay for them and the project is 100% closed source. What you’re suggesting is perpetuating the myth that open source means updates available forever for free. This is not and never has been the case.
  - j1elo 8mo ago
    Was I, really? Maybe, if you feel so... but I'd have to say that I had no idea. What I'm suggesting is that a FOSS project without CLAs and a healthy variety of contributors does belong to the broad open source community that forms around it, while a FOSS project with such CLA is just open to a bait-and-switch scheme because the ownership stays in a single hand that can change course at a moments notice. Whether the project stops receiving updates or not, is an orthogonal matter.
- everfrustrated 8mo ago
  You are correct. Signing a CLA is in effect saying you approve this project doing a rug-pull and becoming closed-source in the future.
- monkey26 8mo ago
  Do you feel the same way if the CLA is to assign copyright to an non profit foundation that is a steward of that open source project?
timcobb 8mo ago
> Just be honest since the start that your product will eventually abandon its FOSS licence. How does this look? How does one "just" do this? What if the whole thing was an evolution over time?
mactavish88 8mo ago
I hear this perspective a lot in relation to open source projects. What it fails to recognize is the reality that life changes. Shit happens. There's no way to predict the future when you start out building an open source project. (Coming from having contributed to and run several open source projects myself)
qudat 8mo ago
At this point I don’t trust any company that offers a core free tool with an upsell. Trials or limited access is one thing, but a free forever product that needs active maintaining, be skeptical. It’s been tough for us at https://pico.sh https://pico.sh trying to figure out the right balance between free and paid and our north star is: how much does it cost us to maintain and support? If the answer scales with the number of users we have then we charge for it. We also have a litmus test for abuse: can someone abuse the service? We are putting it behind a paywall.
kube-system 8mo ago
Almost every FOSS license has a warranty disclaimer. You should have always been taking them seriously. They are there for a reason.
- baq 8mo ago
  Commercial licenses ditto.
  - kube-system 8mo ago
    Gratis commercial licenses, yes. Paid commercial software typically have limited warranties.

by jbstack 8mo ago

vladms 8mo ago

Isn't this the normal sales anyhow for many products? One attracts a customer with unreasonable promises and features, makes him sign a deal to integrate, then issues appear once in production that make you realize you will need to invest more. When you start something (startup, FOSS project, damn even marriage) you might start with the best intentions and then you can learn/change/loose interest. I find it unreasonable to "demand" clarity "at the start" because there is no such thing. Turning it around, any company that adopts a FOSS project should be honest and pay for something if it does not accept the idea that at some point the project will change course (which obviously, does not guarantee much, because even if you pay for something they can decide to shut it down).

praptak 8mo ago
> I find it unreasonable to "demand" clarity "at the start" because there is no such thing. Obviously you cannot "demand" stuff but you can do your due dilligence as the person who chooses a technical solution. Some projects have more clarity than others, for example the Linux foundation or CNCF are basically companies sharing costs for stuff they all benefit from like Linux or Prometheus monitoring and it is highly unlikely they'd do a rug pull. On the other end of the spectrum there are companies with a "free" version of a paid product and the incentive to make the free product crappier so that people pay for the paid version. These should be avoided.
- caniszczyk 8mo ago
  It's not only less likely to have rug pulls in open source foundations, it's not really possible. Some foundations like CNCF have stood up when companies even tried this: https://www.cncf.io/blog/2025/05/01/protecting-nats-and-the-integrity-of-open-source-cncfs-commitment-to-the-community/ https://www.cncf.io/blog/2025/05/01/protecting-nats-and-the-...

hiAndrewQuinn 8mo ago

>Just be honest since the start that your product will eventually abandon its FOSS licence. Then people can make an informed decision. "An informed decision" is not a black or white category, and it definitely isn't when we're talking about risk pricing for B2B services and goods, like what MinIO largely was for those who paid. Any business with financial modelling worth their salt knows that very few things which are good and free today will stay that way tomorrow. The leadership of a firm you transact with may or may not state this in words, but there are many other ways to infer the likelihood of this covertly by paying close attention. And, if you're not paying close attention, it's probably just not that important to your own product. What risks you consider worth tailing are a direct extension of how you view the world. The primary selling point of MinIO for many businesses was, "it's cheaper than AWS for our needs". That's probably still true for many businesses and so there's money to be made at least in the short term.

berkes 8mo ago
"Informed decisions" mean you need to have the information. Like with software development, we often lack the information on which we have to decide architectural, technical or business decisions. The common solution for that is to embrace this. Defer decisions. Make changing easy once you do receive the information. And build "getting information" into the fabric. We call this "Agile", "Lean", "data driven" and so on. I think this applies here too. Very big chance that MinIO team honestly thought that they'd keep it open source but only now gathered enough "information" to make this "informed decision".

adamcrow64 8mo ago

exactly

StopDisinfo910 8mo 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.

growse 8mo ago
It's a social contract, which for many people is a moral contract.
- StopDisinfo910 8mo ago
  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.
  - account42 8mo ago
    Where is the contract to return the shopping cart to the corral?
    - StopDisinfo910 8mo ago
      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.
      - 8mo ago

puszczyk 8mo ago

> Just be honest since the start While I agree with the sentiment, keep in mind that circumstances change over the years. What made sense (and what you've believed in) a few years ago may be different now. This is especially true when it comes to business models.

hirako2000 8mo ago
When your product entered mainstream with integration that would yield millions when virtually obliged to get a license is typically what happens. When backed by a company there is an ethical obligation to keep, at least maintenance. Of course legally they can do what they wish. It isn't unfair to call it bad practice.
- rofrol 8mo ago
  There is no ethical obligation. You just want them to release new work under open source licence.
  - hirako2000 8mo ago
    They already had. And for what purpose you think?
- skeledrew 8mo ago
  There's no way that maintaining something is an ethical obligation, regardless of popularity. There is only legal obligation, for commercial products.
  - hirako2000 8mo ago
    If offering a tie in thing supposedly free of charge without warning that would end once it serves a party less profit purpose then yes. Ethics are not obligations, they are moral principles. Not having principles doesn't send you to prison that is why it isn't law. It makes you lose moral credit though.

jillesvangurp 8mo ago

It's part of the due diligence process for users to decide if they can trust a project. I use a few simple heuristics: - Evaluate who contributes regularly to a project. The more diverse this group is, the better. If it's a handful of individuals from 1 company, see other points. This doesn't have to be a show stopper. If it's a bit niche and only a handful of people contribute, you might want to think about what happens when these people stop doing that (like is happening here). - Look at required contributor agreements and license. A serious red flag here is if a single company can effectively decide to change the license at any point they want to. Major projects like Terraform, Redis, Elasticsearch (repeatedly), etc. have exercised that option. It can be very disruptive when that happens. - Evaluate the license allows you do what you need to do. Licenses like the AGPLv3 (which min.io used here) can be problematic on that front and comes with restrictions that corporate legal departments generally don't like. In the end choosing to use software is a business decision you take. Just make sure you understand what you are getting into and that this is OK with your company and compatible with business goals. - Permissive licenses (MIT, BSD, Apache, etc.) are popular with larger companies and widely used on Github. They facilitate a neutral ground for competitors to collaborate. One aspect you should be aware off is that the very feature that makes them popular also means that contributors can take the software and create modifications under a different license. They generally can't re-license existing software or retroactively. But companies like Elasticsearch have switched from Apache 2.0 to closed source, and recently to AGPLv3. Opensearch remains Apache 2.0 and has a thriving community at this point. - Look at the wider community behind a project. Who runs it; how professional are they (e.g. a foundation), etc. How likely would it be to survive something happening to the main company behind a thing? Companies tend to be less resilient than the open source projects they create over time. They fail, are subject to mergers and acquisitions, can end up in the hands of hedge funds, or big consulting companies like IBM. Many decades old OSS projects have survived multiple such events. Which makes them very safe bets. None of these points have to be decisive. If you really like a company, you might be willing to overlook their less than ideal licensing or other potential red flags. And some things are not that critical if you have to replace them. This is about assessing risk and balancing the tradeoff of value against that. Forks are always an option when bad things happen to projects. But that only works if there's a strong community capable of supporting such a fork and a license that makes that practical. The devil is in the details. When Redis announced their license change, the creation of Valkey was a foregone conclusion. There was just no way that wasn't going to happen. I think it only took a few months for the community to get organized around that. That's a good example of a good community.

devsda 8mo ago

Everyone is quick to assert rights granted by the license terms and fast to say the authors should have chosen a better license from the start in case the license doesnt fit the current situation. License terms don't end there. There is a no warranty clause too in almost every open source license and it is as important as the other parts of the license. There is no promise or guarantees for updates or future versions.

direwolf20 8mo ago
They're not saying they violated the license, they're saying they're assholes. It may not be illegal to say you'll do something for free and then not do it, but it's assholish, especially if you said it to gain customers.
- rofrol 8mo ago
  They gave code for free, under open source, but you call them assholes if they do not release more code for free. So who is the asshole here? You or them?
  - direwolf20 8mo ago
    Nestle started a charity to give free baby formula to mothers in African villages. Once they all stopped producing milk, they stopped the charity and made the formula so expensive it was barely affordable.
- skeledrew 8mo ago
  There's no broken promise though. It's the users who decide+assume, on their own going in, that X project is good for their needs and they'll have access to future versions in a way they're comfortable with. The developers just go along with the decision+assumption, and may choose to break it at any point. They'd only be assholes if they'd explicitly promised the project would unconditionally remain Y for perpetuity, which is a bs promise nobody should listen to, cuz life.
- devsda 8mo ago

yread 8mo ago

Easy. If you see open source software maintained by a company, assume they will make it closed source or enshittify the free version. If it's maintained by an individual assume he will get bored with it. Plan accordingly. It may not happen and then you'll be pleasantly surprised

Someone 8mo ago

> What I do take issue with, however, is convincing everyone that your product is FOSS, waiting until people undertake a lot of work to integrate your product into their infrastructure, and then doing a bait-and-switch. But FOSS means “this particular set of source files is free to use and modify”. It doesn’t include “and we will forever keep developing and maintaining it forever for free”. It’s only different if people, in addition to the FOSS license, promise any further updates will be under the same license and then change course. And yes, there is a gray area where such a promise is sort-of implied, but even then, what do you prefer, the developers abandoning the project, or at least having the option of a paid-for version?

ufocia 8mo ago
> what do you prefer, the developers abandoning the project, or at least having the option of a paid-for version? It's not a binary choice. I prefer the developers releasing the software under a permissive license. I agree that relying on freemium maintenance is naive. The community source lives on, perhaps the community should fork and run with it for the common good absorbing the real costs of maintenance.
- plagiarist 8mo ago
  Well, yes, that's the reason to use FOSS. Nobody can fully rug pull. But the worst case is still needing someone to take over on it.

j1elo 8mo ago

The only meaningful informed decision, but sadly much less known (and I think we should talk and insist more on it), is to be wary if you see a CLA. Not all do, but most perform Copyright Assignment, and that's detrimental to the long-term robustness of Open Source. Having a FOSS license is NOT enough. Idealy the copyright should be distributed across all contributors. That's the only way to make overall consensus a required step before relicensing (except for reimplementation). Pick FOSS projects without CLAs that perform Copyright Assignment to an untrusted entity (few exceptions apply, e.g. the FSF in the past)

baq 8mo ago
Bad advice. You should be wary always. CLA or not, nothing guarantees that the project you depend on will receive updates, not even if you pay for them and the project is 100% closed source. What you’re suggesting is perpetuating the myth that open source means updates available forever for free. This is not and never has been the case.
- j1elo 8mo ago
  Was I, really? Maybe, if you feel so... but I'd have to say that I had no idea. What I'm suggesting is that a FOSS project without CLAs and a healthy variety of contributors does belong to the broad open source community that forms around it, while a FOSS project with such CLA is just open to a bait-and-switch scheme because the ownership stays in a single hand that can change course at a moments notice. Whether the project stops receiving updates or not, is an orthogonal matter.
everfrustrated 8mo ago
You are correct. Signing a CLA is in effect saying you approve this project doing a rug-pull and becoming closed-source in the future.
monkey26 8mo ago
Do you feel the same way if the CLA is to assign copyright to an non profit foundation that is a steward of that open source project?

timcobb 8mo ago

> Just be honest since the start that your product will eventually abandon its FOSS licence. How does this look? How does one "just" do this? What if the whole thing was an evolution over time?

mactavish88 8mo ago

I hear this perspective a lot in relation to open source projects. What it fails to recognize is the reality that life changes. Shit happens. There's no way to predict the future when you start out building an open source project. (Coming from having contributed to and run several open source projects myself)

qudat 8mo ago

At this point I don’t trust any company that offers a core free tool with an upsell. Trials or limited access is one thing, but a free forever product that needs active maintaining, be skeptical. It’s been tough for us at https://pico.sh https://pico.sh trying to figure out the right balance between free and paid and our north star is: how much does it cost us to maintain and support? If the answer scales with the number of users we have then we charge for it. We also have a litmus test for abuse: can someone abuse the service? We are putting it behind a paywall.

kube-system 8mo ago

Almost every FOSS license has a warranty disclaimer. You should have always been taking them seriously. They are there for a reason.

baq 8mo ago
Commercial licenses ditto.
- kube-system 8mo ago
  Gratis commercial licenses, yes. Paid commercial software typically have limited warranties.