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by kuschku 3219 days ago
This is a sad end.

So many companies are showing how to do Open Source right, and make a profit (be they Citus with postgres, GitLab, JetBrains, RedHat, Automattic with Wordpress, etc).

Reddit followed the Wordpress/GitLab model – code is open source, some minor plugins are closed and only available on the hosted solution – for many years, but now stopped that.

This is a sad day. Just like Google killed the open source nature of Android, Reddit killed the open source nature of Reddit. Yes, some tiny minor parts that are used as libraries are still open, but the actual product is not anymore.
2 comments
TheAceOfHearts 3219 days ago
It's definitely frustrating to see products start to get locked down.

On Android I've been happily using F-droid as my primary marketplace. There's lots of high quality apps that are completely open source. But I think some of the more complicated apps end up having maintenance issues. It can be hard for developers to justify spending lots of time fixing bugs and providing support if they're not getting paid.

One option for solving this is to charge for the precompiled version, while freely providing the source. This way users retain source access and the project gets funded. That's what Textual [0] does, which played a big role in convincing me to buy a license.

[0] https://github.com/Codeux-Software/Textual

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kuschku 3219 days ago
There's a few more issues with that.

I'm a developer of open source apps on Android. Thousands of people use them daily.

But to test with new Android versions before release, I will now need a Google Pixel (because Google stopped supporting my Nexus 5X), and Pixels are $900-1300 where I live. Unaffordable.

It all wouldn't be an issue if Android wouldn't have dozens of tiny undocumented API breaks with every release, and the AOSP source that one could check for those only coming out weeks after release.

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djsumdog 3219 days ago
Open source today is far from where we thought it'd be in the 90s. I did a post on this a while back:

http://penguindreams.org/blog/the-philosophy-of-open-source-...

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