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In May this year, users of popular open source project FUSE for macOS noticed the source code for the latest update was missing. The project had become closed source and was no longer free for commercial use. But as The Reg discovered when we had a talk with its maintainer, there was a very good reason for that – and it's not a good look for the many companies that used it.
[...]FUSE for macOS 3.9 can still be freely bundled with commercial software. Then in July of 2019, I released FUSE for macOS 3.10 with support for macOS Catalina under the new, less permissive licence, that requires specific written permission to bundle FUSE with commercial software," he told The Reg.
[...] How is this possible? "Most of the FUSE for macOS source code is released under the BSD licence. However, libfuse, for example, is released under the LGPL. I did what other developers of closed source FUSE forks have been doing for some time. The BSD licence has no copyleft, which means that no one is required to push changes upstream or make them available. As libfuse is covered under the LGPL, changes to it need to be made available, while changes to the kernel code can be kept closed," Fleischer explains.
The outcome? "After the licence change I have been contacted by several companies and negotiated some licence agreements. In this very regard closing the source code of FUSE was a success. In the very least it helped to raise awareness to the difficulties of sustainable open source software development," he said.
Fleischer added that: "I do not like continuing working on FUSE as a closed source project. It has been a hard decision and I have been thinking about it for a very long time, but I stand by it and it seemed to be the only option left to raise awareness and ensure the project's future."
He acknowledges though that: "I have not been very transparent about the licence change."
Source: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/12/16/fuse_macos_closed_source/
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Rich on Tuesday December 17 2019, @02:05PM
So here we have just a case of a change in the position of who's the freeloader to the actual developer (who builds upon the original FUSE code). Because, doing the actual development, he's less of a freeloader than the previous ones, that's more than fair, I'd say. He could've also chosen AGPL2/3 or commercial dual licensing, but I wouldn't want to mess with the legal followup when the companies take the source anyway.
We're talking about customers that, with the attitude of "you get what you pay for" give royal sums of money to Apple (and related big unfree software shops) who in turn lock up the platform and battle the right to repair. I wouldn't provide them with any free, beer or speech, software anyway but rather squeeze whatever money can be had out of them. Or let a few crumbs of cross platform stuff drop off the Linux plate, and present them a $100K Patreon offer, so they get their stuff back when Apple breaks it once more. And I say that as Mac user and developer.).
The other thing is that you should not put Catalina on a Mac: Apple have recently sent a mail to developers. Quote: "We’re trying to make “don’t upgrade” language more neutral and have been sharing this with our wider developer community." ... "Please use: “remain on current versions of macOS until further notice” or "continue to remain on macOS Mojave until further notice”".
I kid you not.
So, to make up for that, and in order everyone can happily work with the still-open FUSE for macOS 3.9 version, don't upgrade to Catalina. Aside from that 32-bit Applications don't work anymore, it can cause all kinds of trouble and problems that might make you sad and miserable. With its bugs and shortcomings your workflow might be impaired. Once you're so full of grief that you take the long and cumbersome journey to an Apple store, the geniuses would likely just try to steer you away from your broken Mac and try to upsell some overpriced hardware that has a soldered-in SSD with limited lifetime and that cannot be repaired.