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FUSE for MacOS: Why a Popular Open Source Library Became Closed Source and Commercially Licensed

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

MrPlow writes:

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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 18 2019, @01:35AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 18 2019, @01:35AM (#933519)

    So from what I read on Github, this Fleischer dude took fuse for macos private because he wanted money, and Apple is fucking with its user base by demanding developers pay for the signature to bless kernel extensions.

    I don't know how much of the code base is his personally, but he seems to have a peanut gallery cheering his decision in the Github messages.

    Apple could cut the Gordian knot here and make available a userspace filesystem facility that a free fork of fuse could talk to.