[socket0]

I find these kinds of stories infuriating (and just a bit frustrating). Charlatans repackage, rebrand, and repurpose FOSS, then sell them at an unrealistic markup to unsuspecting dupes. Anything from PABX or VoIP systems based on Asterisk, through overly complex CMS's based on Wordpress. I'm not sure what riles me more: consumers being ripped off by these products, or the fact that my strengths lie in tech rather than sales.

[cronjobber]

The FSF has always made clear that they don't have any problem with people selling Free Software; it's about freedom, not low low price.

(What infuriates me about this story is that it reminds me of how far companies like Google have destroyed Mail as a protocol usable without their intermediation. Use Googlemail or get your mails spam-binned.)

[woah]

It's a broken federated system with a huge DOS vulnerability (spam). That's not Google's fault.

[cronjobber]

Is the "solution" of pushing everybody onto a handful of centralized platforms entirely dictated by the nature of the problem?

[Kalium]

Of course not! A decentralized, federated solution where everyone running a service takes responsibility for their service and ensures high standards are adhered to is preferable, desirable, and possible.

So preferable, in fact, that professionals have tried! Extensively, exhaustively, and at great length. New standards have been devised. New protocols designed. Newer, more clever ideas pioneered and deployed.

Several decades of trying that approach with results being somewhat below what could be hoped for led users and administrators alike to look for alternatives.

The nature of the problem at hand is that in a highly decentralized system where the cost of use is borne by the receiver and breaking backwards compatibility isn't acceptable, it is extremely difficult to stem abuse. Measures that could stop or diminish abuse will not be taken by abusers, and the need to preserve backwards compatibility prevents cutting off both them and legitimate users on less modern services.

It's a shit scenario. It didn't have to be this way! Yet, there don't seem to be other options on offer that deliver equivalent or better benefits for equivalent or better costs in time and treasure.

[jstanley]

> The FSF has always made clear that they don't have any problem with people selling Free Software

Though I don't think the FSF speaks on behalf of socket0, or vice versa.

[seren]

If you are distributing a product using GPL code aren't you supposed to explicitly display the license in the product manual or somewhere else ? The end user is not supposed to have to open a product case to find out... I have not seen it mentioned in the original post. So this is a license infringement as well.

[adrianN]

If the software package they sell wouldn't be utterly useless crap and instead worked as advertised, I don't think the price would be too high.

[socket0]

Definitely. The problem is that consumers (especially small business) so often end up buying an overpriced and badly configured black box, when a decent expert would have been able to set up the same software properly.