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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 darkfeline on Wednesday December 18 2019, @08:15AM (1 child)
Did you read the summary? The reason the author decided to make it closed source is because companies benefited from it commercially without contributing back to the project. Had the author released the code under GPL in the first place, they would probably not have been forced to close source the project to ensure its survival.
There's a reason that the BSD license is often derisively referred to as the cuck license.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday December 19 2019, @12:35AM
Did YOU read it? Because that's not what the author says:
People can't live forever on air. If he can sell a few license agreements, more power to him.
Or do you have a problem with people charging for software? Free didn't work out too well for RMS in the end - on the day the story of his comments about one of Jeffrey Epstein's victims broke, he was once again begging for a place to stay for a few months.
At 66, sounds like a great retirement plan - for a hobo. Developers have a right to earn a living from their primary work product, and not just from "well you can sell support" bs.
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