Ok, its been a while since I posted here, but this is not the reason not to post again… and again 🙂
Many post to social networks, but I don’t think that good technical discussion belongs there.
Anyway. Want to touch on hot topic recently – wars in some open source projects. Don’t really want to get on either side of those (that is not that simple), but examples concern me a lot:
- Bacula backup vs Bareos – who stole what?
- pfSense protecting their trademark by requiring written agreement to get access to their build tools
Both projects are flagships in their respective areas (backup and firewalls), both trying to get more from commercial operations – maybe that’s the problem?
Contributor took our code and forked it? So what? Wasn’t it open source? Oh, you had some contributions, which were not open source? Because you want to make more money from commercial product? Yes, I understand, but people, who supported this project for a long time want those improvements too and there was nothing released for “community edition” for quite some time. It sad. Reading posts by the owner of Bacula just gives a feeling of someone desperately trying to save the face.
pfSense firewall trying to protect its own trademark? Maybe, but asking to remove community-supplied build, which many were asking for (which added Hyper-V drivers) and then trying to justify letters from lawyers – looks silly and just shows that intent to get code away from community is there.
I do not have anything against making money on open source projects… but I feel that the community should have higher priority than profits. Maybe non-profit is better way to go, but that’s not what people, owning such projects really want – they want to make more money… and maybe sell off to some big corp later – to win a fortune.
Its possible I am wrong. But the above is the result of reading news and discussions.
DGCom words 