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Wait, so a company shared their work with the public for however long, then decided to leave what was shared up ... but stop sharing ... and you're upset?!? Th

Wait, so a company shared their work with the public for however long, then decided to leave what was shared up ... but stop sharing ... and you're upset?!? They did everything properly by the rules of OSS, decided it wasn't in their best interest to keep doing OSS, and left all their code available, as required by OSS. They were a textbook good participant. Meanwhile, 99% of companies never open source anything: why aren't you complaining about how "unethical" they are?

imiric 7mo ago
How can people still not understand that OSS can be abused? It doesn't matter that the previous code is still available. Nobody can technically delete it from the internet, so that's hardly something they did "right". The original maintainers are gone, and users will have to rely on someone else to pick up the work, or maintain it themselves. All of this creates friction, and fragments the community. And are you not familiar with the concept of OSS rugpulls? It's when a company uses OSS as a marketing tool, and when they deem it's not profitable enough, they start cutting corners, prioritizing their commercial product, or, as in this case, shut down the OSS project altogether. None of this is being a "textbook good participant". > Meanwhile, 99% of companies never open source anything: why aren't you complaining about how "unethical" they are? Frankly, there are many companies with proprietary products that behave more ethically and have more respect for their users than this. The fact that a project is released as OSS doesn't make it inherently better. Seeing OSS as a "free gift" is a terrible way of looking at it.
- inetknght 7mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance You might want to get your arguments in order. In one sentence you're calling OSS rugpulls a problem, and then in another you're claiming that proprietary products behave more ethically. So which is it? Is it less-ethical to have provided software as open source, and then later become a proprietary product? Why? I see having source code, even for an old/unmaintained product be strictly superior to having never provided the source code no matter how much "respect" the company has for their users today.
  - imiric 7mo ago
    You might want to think about my argument a bit more. > Is it less-ethical to have provided software as open source, and then later become a proprietary product? Why? Because usually these companies use OSS as a marketing gimmick, not because they believe in it, or want to contribute to a public good. So, yes, this dishonesty is user hostile, and some companies with proprietary products do have more respect for their users. The freedoms provided by free software are a value add on top of essential values that any developer/company should have for the users of their software. OSS projects are not inherently better simply because the code is free to use, share, and modify. To be fair, I don't think a developer/company should be expected to maintain an OSS project indefinitely. Priorities change, life happens. But being a good OSS steward means making this transition gradually, trying to find a new maintainer, etc., to avoid impacting your existing user base. Archiving the project and demanding payment is the epitome of hostile behavior.
    - jrflowers 7mo ago
      It seems like you’re trying to build a system of ethics around being annoyed by OSS maintainers not working for free in perpetuity. Having access to Apache licensed code that you can build off of is better than never having access to any code at all. Anything else about values or respect has to be inferred or imagined and has no bearing on the software itself. Edit: Like who cares if they “wanted” to contribute to the public good? Did they actually contribute to the public good? It seems like they did and the code that did so is right there. If “life happens” then why are they obligated to do a smooth transition? I love free stuff as much as the next person, hell, free stuff is my favorite kind of stuff. Is it annoying when there’s less free stuff? Yes. Does my personal irritation constitute a violation of a lofty set of ideals that just coincidentally dictates that nobody annoy me? No. I would love to live in a world where it just so happens that it’s ethically wrong to bother me though. That would be sweet.
      - ianbutler 7mo ago
        That's what they always do it always comes down to a sense of perpetual entitlement over the work of others, work they themselves would never do. I've had the same discussion for years now on HN. It is not unethical to decide to stop supporting something especially if you played by all the rules the entire time. No one is owed perpetual labor and they completely disregard localstack has been oss for something like 10 years at this point just celebrate it had a good run, fork and maintain yourself if you need it that badly. It is incredibly weird to think something that was maintained oss for 10 years is a rugpull that's just called life, circumstances change.
- armchairhacker 7mo ago
  > It doesn't matter that the previous code is still available…The original maintainers are gone, and users will have to rely on someone else to pick up the work, or maintain it themselves. It does matter: popular products have been forked or the open-source component was reused. E.g. Terraform and OpenTofu, Redis and Redict, Docker and Colima (partly MinIO and RustFS; the latter is a full rewrite, but since the former was FOSS and it’s a “drop-in binary replacement”, I’m sure they looked at the code for reference…) If your environment doesn’t have API changes and vulnerabilities, forking requires practically zero effort. If it does, the alternative to maintaining yourself or convincing someone to maintain it for you (e.g. with donations), is having the original maintainers keep working for free. Although this specific product may be mostly closed source (they’ve had commercial addons before the announcement). If so, the problem here is thinking it was open in the first place.
  - lukevp 7mo ago
    I thought Valkey was the blessed fork of Redis. Is Redict better in some way?
    - inaros 7mo ago
      No
  - drzaiusx11 7mo ago
    To be clear, colima isn't a fork of docker. It's just the lima VM with the docker OCI runtime + cli which is FOSS and always has been. Docker Desktop is the pile of garbage you can kinda sorta replace it with, but PodMan and PodMan Desktop is closer to a clone of Docker than Colima. Colima _is_ Docker
- jalalx 7mo ago
  So basically businesses should go bankrupt because making money is "unethical"
- tedk-42 7mo ago
  Open Source Software doesn't mean maintenance free. The code is all there mate. Their time and efforts and ongoing contributions to the project are not. OSS is not about fairness and free work from people. It's just putting the code out there in public.
- Someone 7mo ago
  > The original maintainers are gone, and users will have to rely on someone else to pick up the work, That’s a risk that no license, open source or not, can protect against. Priorities may change, causing maintainers to stop maintaining, or maintainers (companies or people) may cease to exist. OSS licenses also do not promise that development will continue forever, will continue in a direction you like or anything like that. The only thing open source licenses say is “here’s a specific set of source code that you can use under these limitations”. The expectation that there will be maintenance is a matter of trust that you may or may not have in the developers. > or maintain it themselves. With open source, at least you have that option. > And are you not familiar with the concept of OSS rugpulls? It's when a company uses OSS as a marketing tool, and when they deem it's not profitable enough, they start cutting corners, prioritizing their commercial product, or, as in this case, shut down the OSS project altogether. Companies have to live. It’s not nice if something like that happen to you for a tool you depend on, but you can’t deny companies to stop doing development altogether. In this case, you have something better, as, in addition to picking up maintenance on the existing open source version, you have the choice to pay for a version maintained by the original developers.
etchalon 7mo ago
Because this thread isn't about those other companies.
skeledrew 7mo ago
> a company shared their work with the public for however long, then decided to leave what was shared up More like a company took advantage of a community that expected their freely offered labor to not be commercialized at any point in time without making available said works in a fully free vector as well, as that's an implicit expectation behind "open source".
- reactordev 7mo ago
  Naive fools… Companies stand to turn a profit. OSS is here to help enable that or push the goal posts. It’s not a charity unless the org feels charitable. Sure, non-profits exist but they were never one of those.
  - KronisLV 7mo ago
    I think the comment on corpos is good, but calling the naive people fools might be unnecessary - it’s probably not their fault nobody told them about this sort of thing before and learning that lesson is probably disappointing enough already. It’s unfortunate that this keeps happening to projects like MinIO and others too.
    - gregoryl 7mo ago
      We should return to the HN guidelines, and read it as charitably as possible. I'm interpreting it as closer to pity, rather than genuine criticism =)
      - KronisLV 7mo ago
        Sure! Slightly edited the tone, but I’m noticing that often people have idealistic attitudes about FOSS until they get burnt by bad faith actors or even just indifferent corps that have to keep the lights on. Quite unfortunate, definitely not their fault. Pity is correct.
        reactordev 7mo ago
papyrus9244 7mo ago
> and left all their code available, as required by OSS. IANAL, and I don't have a horse in this race, but I don't think that's required by OSS, not by the spirit of "the law", and (at least) not by GPL, MIT, and other similar mainstream licenses. The spirit of open source is: you buy (or just download for free) a binary, you get the 4 rights. Whatever happens when the developer/company stops distributing (whether at a cost or free as in beer) that binary is completely outside the scope of the license.
- derefr 7mo ago
  You only have the right to modify if you can access the source. If you got (a snapshot of) the source along with the binary, that's fine, there's no need to keep hosting the source anywhere. But if the company said "for source, see: our github", then that github has to stay up/public, for all the people who downloaded the binary a long time ago and are only getting around to exercising their right to modify today. They don't need to post new versions of their software to it, of course. But they need to continue to make the source available somehow to people who were granted a right that can only be exercised if the source is made available to them. (IIRC, some very early versions of this required you to send a physical letter to the company to get a copy of the source back on CD. That would be fine too. But they'd also have to advertise this somewhere, e.g. by stubbing the github repo and replacing it with a note that you can do that.)
  - pocksuppet 7mo ago
    In GPL, it has to be valid for 3 years, but only if they're not the copyright holder. In MIT, a.k.a. "the fuck you license" there is no requirement and they don't even have to give you source code at all.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
inaros 7mo ago
They are going about to learn the same lesson Elastic learned with OpenSearch...
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
bandrami 7mo ago
I can't think of any free or open license that requires you to leave your code available for any specific period of time if you are not simultaneously distributing binaries.

imiric 7mo ago

How can people still not understand that OSS can be abused? It doesn't matter that the previous code is still available. Nobody can technically delete it from the internet, so that's hardly something they did "right". The original maintainers are gone, and users will have to rely on someone else to pick up the work, or maintain it themselves. All of this creates friction, and fragments the community. And are you not familiar with the concept of OSS rugpulls? It's when a company uses OSS as a marketing tool, and when they deem it's not profitable enough, they start cutting corners, prioritizing their commercial product, or, as in this case, shut down the OSS project altogether. None of this is being a "textbook good participant". > Meanwhile, 99% of companies never open source anything: why aren't you complaining about how "unethical" they are? Frankly, there are many companies with proprietary products that behave more ethically and have more respect for their users than this. The fact that a project is released as OSS doesn't make it inherently better. Seeing OSS as a "free gift" is a terrible way of looking at it.

inetknght 7mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance You might want to get your arguments in order. In one sentence you're calling OSS rugpulls a problem, and then in another you're claiming that proprietary products behave more ethically. So which is it? Is it less-ethical to have provided software as open source, and then later become a proprietary product? Why? I see having source code, even for an old/unmaintained product be strictly superior to having never provided the source code no matter how much "respect" the company has for their users today.
- imiric 7mo ago
  You might want to think about my argument a bit more. > Is it less-ethical to have provided software as open source, and then later become a proprietary product? Why? Because usually these companies use OSS as a marketing gimmick, not because they believe in it, or want to contribute to a public good. So, yes, this dishonesty is user hostile, and some companies with proprietary products do have more respect for their users. The freedoms provided by free software are a value add on top of essential values that any developer/company should have for the users of their software. OSS projects are not inherently better simply because the code is free to use, share, and modify. To be fair, I don't think a developer/company should be expected to maintain an OSS project indefinitely. Priorities change, life happens. But being a good OSS steward means making this transition gradually, trying to find a new maintainer, etc., to avoid impacting your existing user base. Archiving the project and demanding payment is the epitome of hostile behavior.
  - jrflowers 7mo ago
    It seems like you’re trying to build a system of ethics around being annoyed by OSS maintainers not working for free in perpetuity. Having access to Apache licensed code that you can build off of is better than never having access to any code at all. Anything else about values or respect has to be inferred or imagined and has no bearing on the software itself. Edit: Like who cares if they “wanted” to contribute to the public good? Did they actually contribute to the public good? It seems like they did and the code that did so is right there. If “life happens” then why are they obligated to do a smooth transition? I love free stuff as much as the next person, hell, free stuff is my favorite kind of stuff. Is it annoying when there’s less free stuff? Yes. Does my personal irritation constitute a violation of a lofty set of ideals that just coincidentally dictates that nobody annoy me? No. I would love to live in a world where it just so happens that it’s ethically wrong to bother me though. That would be sweet.
    - ianbutler 7mo ago
      That's what they always do it always comes down to a sense of perpetual entitlement over the work of others, work they themselves would never do. I've had the same discussion for years now on HN. It is not unethical to decide to stop supporting something especially if you played by all the rules the entire time. No one is owed perpetual labor and they completely disregard localstack has been oss for something like 10 years at this point just celebrate it had a good run, fork and maintain yourself if you need it that badly. It is incredibly weird to think something that was maintained oss for 10 years is a rugpull that's just called life, circumstances change.
armchairhacker 7mo ago
> It doesn't matter that the previous code is still available…The original maintainers are gone, and users will have to rely on someone else to pick up the work, or maintain it themselves. It does matter: popular products have been forked or the open-source component was reused. E.g. Terraform and OpenTofu, Redis and Redict, Docker and Colima (partly MinIO and RustFS; the latter is a full rewrite, but since the former was FOSS and it’s a “drop-in binary replacement”, I’m sure they looked at the code for reference…) If your environment doesn’t have API changes and vulnerabilities, forking requires practically zero effort. If it does, the alternative to maintaining yourself or convincing someone to maintain it for you (e.g. with donations), is having the original maintainers keep working for free. Although this specific product may be mostly closed source (they’ve had commercial addons before the announcement). If so, the problem here is thinking it was open in the first place.
- lukevp 7mo ago
  I thought Valkey was the blessed fork of Redis. Is Redict better in some way?
  - inaros 7mo ago
    No
- drzaiusx11 7mo ago
  To be clear, colima isn't a fork of docker. It's just the lima VM with the docker OCI runtime + cli which is FOSS and always has been. Docker Desktop is the pile of garbage you can kinda sorta replace it with, but PodMan and PodMan Desktop is closer to a clone of Docker than Colima. Colima _is_ Docker
jalalx 7mo ago
So basically businesses should go bankrupt because making money is "unethical"
tedk-42 7mo ago
Open Source Software doesn't mean maintenance free. The code is all there mate. Their time and efforts and ongoing contributions to the project are not. OSS is not about fairness and free work from people. It's just putting the code out there in public.
Someone 7mo ago
> The original maintainers are gone, and users will have to rely on someone else to pick up the work, That’s a risk that no license, open source or not, can protect against. Priorities may change, causing maintainers to stop maintaining, or maintainers (companies or people) may cease to exist. OSS licenses also do not promise that development will continue forever, will continue in a direction you like or anything like that. The only thing open source licenses say is “here’s a specific set of source code that you can use under these limitations”. The expectation that there will be maintenance is a matter of trust that you may or may not have in the developers. > or maintain it themselves. With open source, at least you have that option. > And are you not familiar with the concept of OSS rugpulls? It's when a company uses OSS as a marketing tool, and when they deem it's not profitable enough, they start cutting corners, prioritizing their commercial product, or, as in this case, shut down the OSS project altogether. Companies have to live. It’s not nice if something like that happen to you for a tool you depend on, but you can’t deny companies to stop doing development altogether. In this case, you have something better, as, in addition to picking up maintenance on the existing open source version, you have the choice to pay for a version maintained by the original developers.

etchalon 7mo ago

Because this thread isn't about those other companies.

skeledrew 7mo ago

> a company shared their work with the public for however long, then decided to leave what was shared up More like a company took advantage of a community that expected their freely offered labor to not be commercialized at any point in time without making available said works in a fully free vector as well, as that's an implicit expectation behind "open source".

reactordev 7mo ago
Naive fools… Companies stand to turn a profit. OSS is here to help enable that or push the goal posts. It’s not a charity unless the org feels charitable. Sure, non-profits exist but they were never one of those.
- KronisLV 7mo ago
  I think the comment on corpos is good, but calling the naive people fools might be unnecessary - it’s probably not their fault nobody told them about this sort of thing before and learning that lesson is probably disappointing enough already. It’s unfortunate that this keeps happening to projects like MinIO and others too.
  - gregoryl 7mo ago
    We should return to the HN guidelines, and read it as charitably as possible. I'm interpreting it as closer to pity, rather than genuine criticism =)
    - KronisLV 7mo ago
      Sure! Slightly edited the tone, but I’m noticing that often people have idealistic attitudes about FOSS until they get burnt by bad faith actors or even just indifferent corps that have to keep the lights on. Quite unfortunate, definitely not their fault. Pity is correct.
      - reactordev 7mo ago

papyrus9244 7mo ago

> and left all their code available, as required by OSS. IANAL, and I don't have a horse in this race, but I don't think that's required by OSS, not by the spirit of "the law", and (at least) not by GPL, MIT, and other similar mainstream licenses. The spirit of open source is: you buy (or just download for free) a binary, you get the 4 rights. Whatever happens when the developer/company stops distributing (whether at a cost or free as in beer) that binary is completely outside the scope of the license.

derefr 7mo ago
You only have the right to modify if you can access the source. If you got (a snapshot of) the source along with the binary, that's fine, there's no need to keep hosting the source anywhere. But if the company said "for source, see: our github", then that github has to stay up/public, for all the people who downloaded the binary a long time ago and are only getting around to exercising their right to modify today. They don't need to post new versions of their software to it, of course. But they need to continue to make the source available somehow to people who were granted a right that can only be exercised if the source is made available to them. (IIRC, some very early versions of this required you to send a physical letter to the company to get a copy of the source back on CD. That would be fine too. But they'd also have to advertise this somewhere, e.g. by stubbing the github repo and replacing it with a note that you can do that.)
- pocksuppet 7mo ago
  In GPL, it has to be valid for 3 years, but only if they're not the copyright holder. In MIT, a.k.a. "the fuck you license" there is no requirement and they don't even have to give you source code at all.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

inaros 7mo ago

They are going about to learn the same lesson Elastic learned with OpenSearch...

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]

bandrami 7mo ago

I can't think of any free or open license that requires you to leave your code available for any specific period of time if you are not simultaneously distributing binaries.