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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: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Tuesday December 17 2019, @02:17PM (3 children)
I am a strong opponent of the FUSE. I consider it a fatal design error in system architecture, adding fragility to the point where it doesn't belong to.
The reasons are mostly technical: putting a filesystem into userspace undermines both stability and security of the whole system. It is a miscomposition.
So, concerning this one specific news I believe closing the source base for MacOS was a necessity to do because of some critical vulnerabilities arised already on that platform.
Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by RamiK on Tuesday December 17 2019, @02:50PM
To my knowledge, every single OS research project and commercial product in the last 30 years primarily targeting security and reliability opted for a micro kernel running the file server in user space.
compiling...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 17 2019, @03:22PM
FUSE allows unprivileged users to mount filesystems of their choice without impacting the system's overall security (i.e. without running kernel code). Only that user can access the filesystem, so there's no risk of causing stability issues for root or other users. FUSE isn't used for things like root filesystems, it's used for mounting a giant archive you want to access, but not waste space unpacking; or fetching files over an unusual network protocol.
I use FUSE on my HTPC to get multimedia over HTTP from my server in the basement. It uses nginx's built-in directory indexing. Writing rohttpfs was easier than installing webdav. The most common point of failure is not the filesystem, but the network going down, and the filesystem fails gracefully when that happens.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 18 2019, @02:03AM
I'm sure Tanenbaum and Liedtke would like to have a discussion with you, Mr. Torvalds.