Yeah, there's a trend of people who don't actually believe in software freedoms releasing a subset of their proprietary software under free software licenses and pretending.
It's really just a bait and switch to try to get free community engagement around a commercial product. It's fundamentally dishonest. I call it "open source cosplay". They're not real open source projects (in the sense that if you write a feature under a free software license that competes with their paid proprietary software, there's zero percent chance it will be upstreamed, even if all of the users of the project want it) so they shouldn't get the credit for being such just because they slapped a free software license on a fraction of their proprietary code.
Invariably they also want contributors to sign a rights-assignment CLA so they can reuse free software contributions (that they didn't pay for) in their for-profit proprietary project. Never sign a CLA that assigns rights.
Some open source projects flat-out illegally "relicensed" open source contributions as a proprietary license when they wanted to start selling software (CapRover). Some just start removing features or refuse to integrate features (Minio, Mattermost, etc). Many (such as Minio) use nonfree fake open source licenses like the AGPL[1].
It's all a scam by people who don't care about software freedoms. If you believe in software freedoms, you never release any software that isn't free software.
znpy|4 months ago
Some former colleagues still using gitlab ce tell me they also removed features from their self-hosted version, particularly from their runners.
sneak|4 months ago
It's really just a bait and switch to try to get free community engagement around a commercial product. It's fundamentally dishonest. I call it "open source cosplay". They're not real open source projects (in the sense that if you write a feature under a free software license that competes with their paid proprietary software, there's zero percent chance it will be upstreamed, even if all of the users of the project want it) so they shouldn't get the credit for being such just because they slapped a free software license on a fraction of their proprietary code.
Invariably they also want contributors to sign a rights-assignment CLA so they can reuse free software contributions (that they didn't pay for) in their for-profit proprietary project. Never sign a CLA that assigns rights.
Some open source projects flat-out illegally "relicensed" open source contributions as a proprietary license when they wanted to start selling software (CapRover). Some just start removing features or refuse to integrate features (Minio, Mattermost, etc). Many (such as Minio) use nonfree fake open source licenses like the AGPL[1].
It's all a scam by people who don't care about software freedoms. If you believe in software freedoms, you never release any software that isn't free software.
[1]: https://sneak.berlin/20250720/the-agpl-is-nonfree/