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This is disappointing, time to migrate from yet another was-open-source-now-only-technically-open-source software. At work the trend is only adopt open source

This is disappointing, time to migrate from yet another was-open-source-now-only-technically-open-source software. At work the trend is only adopt open source on a paid plan, adopting or relying on open source otherwise is just waiting for the rug to be pulled. Essentially treat open source as closed source. How did we end up with this state of affairs?

Grombobulous 18d ago
Oftentimes the alternative is migrating to one dying or unstable zero-funding open source project to the next. Which path you go down depends on a lot of factors of that particular piece of software. Can I trust FreeCORE to be a stable, secure project that hangs on to my NAS data if it’s an unfunded fork? Or would it be better to give up some openness for something like TrueNAS SCALE? When it comes to stuff like Proxmox and TrueNAS I think a lot of what keeps those good products for homelab use is the fact that they have commercial customers paying for the development. I can count on TrueNAS being around and getting updates because they have a proven revenue stream. That said, it’s a balance, because sometimes that commercialization becomes a rug pull. A lot of the viability of those projects for homelab use revolves around the companies that put those products out recognizing that they have a customer base that will not pay and accepting that fact without deciding to try to squeeze out every last person who just might pay by compromising the free edition. I like the way Proxmox and OpnSense handle this: you get the community patch channels which are “not for production use” which scares the corporate businesses into paying but has zero negative impact for home users. To be clear I’m also not saying FreeCORE specifically is a fly-by-night project or unstable or anything. I’m genuinely unfamiliar with it. I’m just saying, sometimes projects like that end up not being the right choice for certain use cases.
- Brian_K_White 18d ago
  Regardless the estimated quality of the new thing, there is a point and a value in penalizing the old thing when it fails to adhere to principles. One must have principles onesself to see this as imortant though. A lot of people use words like "practical" or "pragmatic" to avoid inconvenience. I've already been using zVault for a year which is a fork of the last truenas core, but it never got any further updates and it's about to become impossible to run up to date software in jails on the old host. The pkg repos that support the host version are about to go eol and the binaries will be gone. So I've already gone through the "what if this doesn't go anywhere?" My point: It's a pain but I won't relieve that pain by running trunas scale. I'd rather try switching to xigmanas or dump the whole concept of the front end and just run plain freebsd and learn a few commands to manage storage and file services directly and a maybe a seperate dedicated jail manager like bastille. At least that way I can never be stuck in this position again where I can't update my own software because someone else stopped updating their software.
  - Grombobulous 17d ago
    I totally understand why you’ve made those choices. It just might be worth questioning how much of your own time these principles are worth. This entire time you’ve been swapping between NAS distros fiddling with your NAS box my TrueNAS SCALE installation has required approximately zero of my time and has never lost the ability to be updated. To me, the NAS aspect of my homelab is the least interesting and is something I just want to install once and forget about. Did they violate some principles of the open source ethos? I guess so; they deprecated build scripts, but the source code of the product is still available and GPLv3. The practical impact to the end user is effectively zero. I’m not even sure I would personally need the source code to be available when it comes to a NAS solution — I did consider unraid as a potential alternative before settling on TrueNAS.
    - Brian_K_White 17d ago
      They probably didn't do anything illegal. They did something I don't approve of. Since I am not one of their C suite or majority shareholders, I have no other way to express what I want and what I don't want. The usual answer if you don't like something is take it or leave it. So I leave it. Talking about it someplace public like here, I am not trying to be demanding or entitled or anything, just documenting why I choose to leave it, or why one might choose to leave it, even if it's inconvenient.
      - Grombobulous 17d ago
        Oh yes, to be clear, I don’t at all think you shouldn’t express your dissatisfaction in this way. I consider it a discussion with varying opinions, and I’m sure you’ve already thought about the time/convenience/principles tradeoff.
threecheese 18d ago
Knowing a little about the maintainers and their model, this isn’t a private-equity cash grab or Mr Monopoly twirling his moustache; it’s a business trying to stay sustainable in open source. There are no billionaires here: they staff developers who contribute to projects like OpenZFS, and developers who build enterprise features that fund all of it. Their business is being challenged by “global” shops taking advantage of the platforms openness - and this isn’t the virtuous or even legally tenable type of competition. It’s “violating terms and not legally accessible” competition, and they are taking measures. It sucks for everyone. If TrueNAS/iX whatever turns around and sells to Bending Spoons, then I’ll of course owe you a beer. Until then, their leadership is just trying keep the project alive - and funding other open source efforts at the same time. Maybe AI fucks all of this up, who knows ….
applfanboysbgon 18d ago
Why is it not enough to give you all of their code for free? Why do they also have obligations and expectations beyond that? The entitlement never ends! > At work the trend is only adopt open source on a paid plan, adopting or relying on open source otherwise is just waiting for the rug to be pulled. "Won't do free labour for our commercial enterprise to profit off of forever" is a rug pull now? It's incredible that you can type these words with a straight face.
- president_zippy 18d ago
  You didn't deserve to be downvoted to hell and back. People deserve to be paid for their work, and without copyright law only mega-cap companies would ever be able to capture enough value from their work to survive. People act like you're saying Disney should be able to hold a copyright on Mickey Mouse for over 100 years. Calling it a "rug pull" when the creator of an open source project decides to stop giving away future work for free is a delusional level of self-entitlement. (1) The previous releases are still open source. If you don't like it, fork the last free release and maintain it yourself. (2) People deserve whatever the market is willing to pay for their work. See above. Frankly, if D. Richard Hipp decided to stop giving away future versions of SQLite for free, I would be the first person to congratulate him for finally having the courage to put his foot down and say "my fellow committers and I deserve at least a few million dollars for 20 years of work making something that billions of machines rely upon."
  - mightyham 18d ago
    Open-source is an inherently radical anti-capitalist philosophy. In your eyes everyone "deserves" what the market is willing to pay, but open-source developers would rather donate their time and energy to create or contribute to something that is freely accessible to anyone and everyone. Also, believe it or not, but some people are not motivated by money, and actually derive value from the process of creating software. The issue with rug-pulls like this is that they are deceptively masquerading with this philosophy as a calculated business strategy to adopt users. Then in this case they start using deceptive tactics like removing build files so they can continue appearing to be fully open source, even though they are violating the spirit of that term. Finally, they drop the facade when it is deemed valuable enough. Even if you are a strict capitalist, there is nothing virtuous or meritocratic about these kinds of business strategies, they rely on tricky, concealed intentions, and rightfully deserve criticism. I'll also add that there is nothing "courageous" about deciding to extract more value from your labor at the expense of public accessibility. True courage is found in acts of selfless sacrifice.
a2ff6eeb0 18d ago
Nobody wants to fund it. But, at this point, AI makes code cheap enough that I would just fork the open source software and maintain it, instead of paying for a third party. Heck, even with saas, I may clone internally.
- globular-toast 18d ago
  You want to vibe code your own NAS and filesystem software? AI makes code cheap, it doesn't make true understanding and expertise cheap.
  - lazide 18d ago
    Talk about a quick road to ruin, too. Both those areas are extremely prone to ‘oops’ bugs nuking your data which you only discover months later.
  - a2ff6eeb0 17d ago
    Sure it does. It's as already better at spotting bugs than human programmers. The entire reason to use it is because it's trained on huge amounts of expertise.

Grombobulous 18d ago

Oftentimes the alternative is migrating to one dying or unstable zero-funding open source project to the next. Which path you go down depends on a lot of factors of that particular piece of software. Can I trust FreeCORE to be a stable, secure project that hangs on to my NAS data if it’s an unfunded fork? Or would it be better to give up some openness for something like TrueNAS SCALE? When it comes to stuff like Proxmox and TrueNAS I think a lot of what keeps those good products for homelab use is the fact that they have commercial customers paying for the development. I can count on TrueNAS being around and getting updates because they have a proven revenue stream. That said, it’s a balance, because sometimes that commercialization becomes a rug pull. A lot of the viability of those projects for homelab use revolves around the companies that put those products out recognizing that they have a customer base that will not pay and accepting that fact without deciding to try to squeeze out every last person who just might pay by compromising the free edition. I like the way Proxmox and OpnSense handle this: you get the community patch channels which are “not for production use” which scares the corporate businesses into paying but has zero negative impact for home users. To be clear I’m also not saying FreeCORE specifically is a fly-by-night project or unstable or anything. I’m genuinely unfamiliar with it. I’m just saying, sometimes projects like that end up not being the right choice for certain use cases.

Brian_K_White 18d ago
Regardless the estimated quality of the new thing, there is a point and a value in penalizing the old thing when it fails to adhere to principles. One must have principles onesself to see this as imortant though. A lot of people use words like "practical" or "pragmatic" to avoid inconvenience. I've already been using zVault for a year which is a fork of the last truenas core, but it never got any further updates and it's about to become impossible to run up to date software in jails on the old host. The pkg repos that support the host version are about to go eol and the binaries will be gone. So I've already gone through the "what if this doesn't go anywhere?" My point: It's a pain but I won't relieve that pain by running trunas scale. I'd rather try switching to xigmanas or dump the whole concept of the front end and just run plain freebsd and learn a few commands to manage storage and file services directly and a maybe a seperate dedicated jail manager like bastille. At least that way I can never be stuck in this position again where I can't update my own software because someone else stopped updating their software.
- Grombobulous 17d ago
  I totally understand why you’ve made those choices. It just might be worth questioning how much of your own time these principles are worth. This entire time you’ve been swapping between NAS distros fiddling with your NAS box my TrueNAS SCALE installation has required approximately zero of my time and has never lost the ability to be updated. To me, the NAS aspect of my homelab is the least interesting and is something I just want to install once and forget about. Did they violate some principles of the open source ethos? I guess so; they deprecated build scripts, but the source code of the product is still available and GPLv3. The practical impact to the end user is effectively zero. I’m not even sure I would personally need the source code to be available when it comes to a NAS solution — I did consider unraid as a potential alternative before settling on TrueNAS.
  - Brian_K_White 17d ago
    They probably didn't do anything illegal. They did something I don't approve of. Since I am not one of their C suite or majority shareholders, I have no other way to express what I want and what I don't want. The usual answer if you don't like something is take it or leave it. So I leave it. Talking about it someplace public like here, I am not trying to be demanding or entitled or anything, just documenting why I choose to leave it, or why one might choose to leave it, even if it's inconvenient.
    - Grombobulous 17d ago
      Oh yes, to be clear, I don’t at all think you shouldn’t express your dissatisfaction in this way. I consider it a discussion with varying opinions, and I’m sure you’ve already thought about the time/convenience/principles tradeoff.

threecheese 18d ago

Knowing a little about the maintainers and their model, this isn’t a private-equity cash grab or Mr Monopoly twirling his moustache; it’s a business trying to stay sustainable in open source. There are no billionaires here: they staff developers who contribute to projects like OpenZFS, and developers who build enterprise features that fund all of it. Their business is being challenged by “global” shops taking advantage of the platforms openness - and this isn’t the virtuous or even legally tenable type of competition. It’s “violating terms and not legally accessible” competition, and they are taking measures. It sucks for everyone. If TrueNAS/iX whatever turns around and sells to Bending Spoons, then I’ll of course owe you a beer. Until then, their leadership is just trying keep the project alive - and funding other open source efforts at the same time. Maybe AI fucks all of this up, who knows ….

applfanboysbgon 18d ago

Why is it not enough to give you all of their code for free? Why do they also have obligations and expectations beyond that? The entitlement never ends! > At work the trend is only adopt open source on a paid plan, adopting or relying on open source otherwise is just waiting for the rug to be pulled. "Won't do free labour for our commercial enterprise to profit off of forever" is a rug pull now? It's incredible that you can type these words with a straight face.

president_zippy 18d ago
You didn't deserve to be downvoted to hell and back. People deserve to be paid for their work, and without copyright law only mega-cap companies would ever be able to capture enough value from their work to survive. People act like you're saying Disney should be able to hold a copyright on Mickey Mouse for over 100 years. Calling it a "rug pull" when the creator of an open source project decides to stop giving away future work for free is a delusional level of self-entitlement. (1) The previous releases are still open source. If you don't like it, fork the last free release and maintain it yourself. (2) People deserve whatever the market is willing to pay for their work. See above. Frankly, if D. Richard Hipp decided to stop giving away future versions of SQLite for free, I would be the first person to congratulate him for finally having the courage to put his foot down and say "my fellow committers and I deserve at least a few million dollars for 20 years of work making something that billions of machines rely upon."
- mightyham 18d ago
  Open-source is an inherently radical anti-capitalist philosophy. In your eyes everyone "deserves" what the market is willing to pay, but open-source developers would rather donate their time and energy to create or contribute to something that is freely accessible to anyone and everyone. Also, believe it or not, but some people are not motivated by money, and actually derive value from the process of creating software. The issue with rug-pulls like this is that they are deceptively masquerading with this philosophy as a calculated business strategy to adopt users. Then in this case they start using deceptive tactics like removing build files so they can continue appearing to be fully open source, even though they are violating the spirit of that term. Finally, they drop the facade when it is deemed valuable enough. Even if you are a strict capitalist, there is nothing virtuous or meritocratic about these kinds of business strategies, they rely on tricky, concealed intentions, and rightfully deserve criticism. I'll also add that there is nothing "courageous" about deciding to extract more value from your labor at the expense of public accessibility. True courage is found in acts of selfless sacrifice.

a2ff6eeb0 18d ago

Nobody wants to fund it. But, at this point, AI makes code cheap enough that I would just fork the open source software and maintain it, instead of paying for a third party. Heck, even with saas, I may clone internally.

globular-toast 18d ago
You want to vibe code your own NAS and filesystem software? AI makes code cheap, it doesn't make true understanding and expertise cheap.
- lazide 18d ago
  Talk about a quick road to ruin, too. Both those areas are extremely prone to ‘oops’ bugs nuking your data which you only discover months later.
- a2ff6eeb0 17d ago
  Sure it does. It's as already better at spotting bugs than human programmers. The entire reason to use it is because it's trained on huge amounts of expertise.