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?

  • emb@lemmy.world
    49·
    2 months 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.

  • davel@lemmy.mlEnglish
    14·
    2 months 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.

  • Eyck_of_denesle@lemmy.zip
    9·
    2 months 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.

    • makingStuffForFun@lemmy.ml
      4·
      2 months ago

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

    • bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      4·
      2 months 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.