alt Hacker NewsHow can people still not understand that OSS can be abused?
It doesn't matter that the previous code is still available. Nobody can technically delete it from the internet, so that's hardly something they did "right".
The original maintainers are gone, and users will have to rely on someone else to pick up the work, or maintain it themselves. All of this creates friction, and fragments the community.
And are you not familiar with the concept of OSS rugpulls? It's when a company uses OSS as a marketing tool, and when they deem it's not profitable enough, they start cutting corners, prioritizing their commercial product, or, as in this case, shut down the OSS project altogether. None of this is being a "textbook good participant".
> Meanwhile, 99% of companies never open source anything: why aren't you complaining about how "unethical" they are?
Frankly, there are many companies with proprietary products that behave more ethically and have more respect for their users than this. The fact that a project is released as OSS doesn't make it inherently better. Seeing OSS as a "free gift" is a terrible way of looking at it.
Replies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
You might want to get your arguments in order. In one sentence you're calling OSS rugpulls a problem, and then in another you're claiming that proprietary products behave more ethically.
So which is it? Is it less-ethical to have provided software as open source, and then later become a proprietary product? Why? I see having source code, even for an old/unmaintained product be strictly superior to having never provided the source code no matter how much "respect" the company has for their users today.
Open Source Software doesn't mean maintenance free.
The code is all there mate.
Their time and efforts and ongoing contributions to the project are not.
OSS is not about fairness and free work from people. It's just putting the code out there in public.
> The original maintainers are gone, and users will have to rely on someone else to pick up the work,
That’s a risk that no license, open source or not, can protect against. Priorities may change, causing maintainers to stop maintaining, or maintainers (companies or people) may cease to exist.
OSS licenses also do not promise that development will continue forever, will continue in a direction you like or anything like that.
The only thing open source licenses say is “here’s a specific set of source code that you can use under these limitations”. The expectation that there will be maintenance is a matter of trust that you may or may not have in the developers.
> or maintain it themselves.
With open source, at least you have that option.
> And are you not familiar with the concept of OSS rugpulls? It's when a company uses OSS as a marketing tool, and when they deem it's not profitable enough, they start cutting corners, prioritizing their commercial product, or, as in this case, shut down the OSS project altogether.
Companies have to live. It’s not nice if something like that happen to you for a tool you depend on, but you can’t deny companies to stop doing development altogether.
In this case, you have something better, as, in addition to picking up maintenance on the existing open source version, you have the choice to pay for a version maintained by the original developers.
So basically businesses should go bankrupt because making money is "unethical"
> It doesn't matter that the previous code is still available…The original maintainers are gone, and users will have to rely on someone else to pick up the work, or maintain it themselves.
It does matter: popular products have been forked or the open-source component was reused. E.g. Terraform and OpenTofu, Redis and Redict, Docker and Colima (partly MinIO and RustFS; the latter is a full rewrite, but since the former was FOSS and it’s a “drop-in binary replacement”, I’m sure they looked at the code for reference…)
If your environment doesn’t have API changes and vulnerabilities, forking requires practically zero effort. If it does, the alternative to maintaining yourself or convincing someone to maintain it for you (e.g. with donations), is having the original maintainers keep working for free.
Although this specific product may be mostly closed source (they’ve had commercial addons before the announcement). If so, the problem here is thinking it was open in the first place.