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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday December 17 2019, @10:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the interesting-development dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow4408

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/


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 17 2019, @08:17PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 17 2019, @08:17PM (#933386)

    This is why I switched from being a free software advocate to a plain socialist. As long as there are literally hundreds of billions of dollars to be made by charging licensing fees, Digital Rights Management, data tracking for the purposes of advertising, and planned obsolescence the free software community will never reach a useful level of market penetration.

    A lot of free software developers and users are fine with that. They run their own Linux or *BSD installation and don't care what the rest of the world does.

    I disagree. I think user freedom only has value if it's commonplace or universal. I run my own mail server but everyone I correspond with uses a hosted service, so all of my email is still read and mined for advertising purposes. The number of websites one can usefully access with NoScript is getting smaller each month. I can't bank, shop for groceries, or watch a movie without having the data recorded and sold unless I pay cash at a farmer's market. Even if I turn off my phone's location services, my wireless carrier can use cell tower signal strength triangulation to collect that information and sell it.

    We're not going to earn these freedoms back working on software and gadgets in our spare time, even if there are hundreds of thousands of us. There's too much profit in attacking freedom and no business model for protecting it. The core problem is simply capitalism.

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