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

submitted 5 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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[-] bytesmythe@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 days ago

I saw this website that is trying to help evaluate projects to see if they live up to their claims of being free / open source: https://isitreallyfoss.com/

[-] emb@lemmy.world 72 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

The term for this is openwashing. Seems like it's been ramping up for a while. Any software or tech vendors know that open(source) is an attractive point, especially to devs. But they don't want to deal with the realities of it.

Most famous example in recent times is OpenAI, which has that name but not much else.

[-] einkorn@feddit.org 50 points 5 days ago

Personally I make a distinction between open source and free (as in freedom) software. Free software is open source but open source software isn't necessarily free.

I can check and validate the open source software that these fremium devs provide but it isn't free. The premium part they offer is neither open source nor free.

[-] fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 7 points 4 days ago

This is contrary to OSS definitions. Personally, I'm not a fan of the strict position OSS takes with things like SSPLv1, but I'm the vocal minority.

Free software and open source are the same thing in the accepted definition. A good example of where this is tough is something like MongoDB, where it's free to run and source available, but the license doesn't allow you to resale it as a service. This was done to stop companies like Azure and AWS from making millions without supporting development, while not restricting most business use.

By OSS standards, Mongo is not free, and is not open source.

[-] einkorn@feddit.org 2 points 4 days ago

This is contrary to OSS definitions.

Yes, that's why I added 'personally'.

[-] Renohren@lemmy.today 30 points 4 days ago

RMS warned of this a bit over 20 years ago. This is why you should get Free and Open source software and not Open Source Software. Preferably with a GPL licence which allows you to download, run, read the code, modify it and share it. Open source can mean you only have the right to read the code and signal to the dev code you've saw that could have been better or errors you saw.

[-] djehuti@programming.dev 1 points 4 days ago

Cough cough 40 cough cough

[-] Eyck_of_denesle@lemmy.zip 14 points 4 days ago

Tons of note taking apps are like this. I'm fine with premium for sync but putting restrictions over how many tags you can use and such cheap practices is so irritating. Especially with how saturated this market is there is not a single good one that ticks everything. Logsec was close but it's in development hell for a while.

[-] davel@lemmy.ml 16 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Yes, some free/freemium products mislead or straight-up lie. Check the source code and the license(s). In some cases the fee version is open source but the premium version is neither open nor even source-available. AlternativeTo lets you filter based on Open Source, Free, and Paid.

[-] Yaky@slrpnk.net 9 points 5 days ago

The ones I know of are not really masquerading, but rather, funding themselves and/or directly related services (often hosting) via convenient ways.

Conversations.im (XMPP/Jabber client) is $8 on Google Play, free on F-Droid and is FOSS. Dev runs their own instance.
OsmAnd+ costs money on Google Play, is free on F-Droid, provides hosting of gigabytes of map data.
Beeper (bridges from popular chats to Matrix) costs money (subscription I believe), but can be set up on one's own (I run two bridges on my chat server).

What I do dislike is companies overusing "Open" or "Free" in their own or their product names, with no implication of Free or Open Source software. Similar to slapping "engineer" on non-engineering roles or "manager" on non-managerial ones.

[-] 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 4 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 4 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 4 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.