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Is it me or are many freemium applications masquerading as opensource applications? (lemmy.world)

submitted 6 days ago by nicgentile@lemmy.world to c/opensource@lemmy.ml

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My creds: Been in open source for 25 years, one of the earlier users of Ubuntu when it launched in Fourways, South Africa (remember those sleeved CDs they used to send for installation media) though I hardcore rep Debian, have deployed and supported countless tools across 3 continents, the most memorable being Mambo which later became Joomla, though I switched to Drupal.

I think the label has been hijacked by many corporations to front an ethical FOSS front but in reality release a hobbled version of their software that is inherently open source at the core, but, has a commercial hard gate around certain things, like scalability/performance/high availability, authentication and security (big yikes here), integrations, usability, reporting and analytics etc... you get where I am going with this. I respect that people have to do what they have to do to eat and grow, but there is blatant misrepresentation happening and it needs to be called out. Or maybe I am wrong here?

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[-] pastermil@sh.itjust.works 1 points 5 days ago

I've never seen a freemium getting mislabeled. Can you give an example?

[-] bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 points 5 days ago

Here's one, InfluxDB (a time series database) advertises itself Open Source, but that's only true for their Core platform, and many common features of a DB (high availability, read replicas, etc) are behind the Enterprise offering. Even if you are going to self host, you have to pay and agree to their terms.

I get having to pay for hosting and support, but it seems like they are intentionally neutering the core version to be able to push their paid business model, while benefiting from the testing and contributions from the community on the core model.

[-] pastermil@sh.itjust.works 4 points 5 days ago

Wow, this is indeed shitty..

[-] makingStuffForFun@lemmy.ml 8 points 5 days ago

N8N. Claims to be open source. After a bit of an outcry, call their code availability 'Faircode' now. It's openwashing

[-] pReya@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 5 days ago

Yeah, it is. But I think they've dialled it down quite a bit. Or do you still have som examples where they claim to be open source? It's mostly users misunderstanding what OSS is.

[-] chebra@mstdn.io 2 points 5 days ago

@pastermil @nicgentile
cal.com - supposedly AGPL core with proprietary "enterprise" code in specific directories, but the open source doesn't even build without the enterprise code.