What will happen in future? "As long as I'm the maintainer of the FUSE for macOS project, FUSE will always be free for non-commercial use," he told El Reg. So they take control of their work product and start capturing some of that value for themselves," said one. "I hope we see more of this in the future: developers realising that the work they do has value and that they're not required to spend their lives giving it away for free. That said, many of the responses are sympathetic. He acknowledges though that: "I have not been very transparent about the licence change."Ī recent discussion on Hacker News shows how "opinion are obviously very divided," he said. 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." In the very least it helped to raise awareness to the difficulties of sustainable open source software development," he said.įleischer added that: "I do not like continuing working on FUSE as a closed source project. In this very regard closing the source code of FUSE was a success. The outcome? "After the licence change I have been contacted by several companies and negotiated some licence agreements. 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 BSD licence has no copyleft, which means that no one is required to push changes upstream or make them available. I did what other developers of closed source FUSE forks have been doing for some time. However, libfuse, for example, is released under the LGPL. How is this possible? "Most of the FUSE for macOS source code is released under the BSD licence. 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. "FUSE for macOS 3.9 can still be freely bundled with commercial software. This was the reason why Fleischer stopped releasing the source code and also changed the licence. Asking for donations for a component of an application that users already paid for is not the right approach." Many end users are not aware they are using FUSE or know which service it provides. Most of the time FUSE is installed silently by third-party applications that expose a virtual file system. "In order to take FUSE for OS X to the next level, I would like to spend more time working on it, but this won't be possible without being compensated for my work," he explained at the time.Īmong the issues, he told us, is that "FUSE is not an end user product. The problem? Fleischer was doing most of the development work for free. Today FUSE for macOS is used by many big internet companies, among them cloud storage and infrastructure-as-a-service providers and even popular social networks." "A lot of time has passed since then and the number of applications relying on FUSE for macOS has grown rapidly. MacFUSE, as the project was originally called, had already been abandoned for some time and it did not support 64-bit kernels, so I started tinkering with the code," Fleischer told The Register. I was relying on NTFS-3G, a popular FUSE file system, and wanted to use Mac OS X Snow Leopard's new 64-bit kernel. I was studying computer science and working on FUSE started out as a hobby. A tale of exposure bucks: How to lose a dev in 8 years "That's not the standard Developer ID certificate every registered developer gets," said Fleischer. A further complication facing developers thinking of forking the last open source version is that running FUSE on macOS requires a kernel extension signing certificate.
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