It's a social contract, which for many people is a moral contract.

Show me a FOSS license where a commitment to indefinite maintenance is promised.

Social contracts are typically unwritten so the license would be the wrong place to look for it.

If it's neither written nor explicitly spoken, then it's not a contract of any kind. It's just an - usually naive - expectation.

A social contract isn't a legal contract to begin with, but even for those "written or explicitly spoken" is not a hard requirement.

A social contract still has to be explicit in some way to be considered such. Otherwise it's just an accepted convention.

That's not what a social contract is you are thinking of a legal contract, something very different. A social contract is by definition, implicit rather than explicit.

It was not expectation when they started, did a lot to lure many into the ecosystem. When you release it free, wait for the momentum to build, then you cut off, it is something else. And the worse is they did it in a very short time. Check out elasticsearch, the same route but did not abandon the 7 release like this.

I know all about ElasticSearch, MongoDB, Redis, etc. Yes, what they did sucks. No, it doesn't make the maintainers bad or anything. It's still on the user to know that anything can happen to that spiffy project they've been using for a while, and so be prepared to migrate at any time.

> Social contracts are typically unwritten

Maybe this is the case, but why is your presumption of entitlement to free labor of others the assumed social contract, the assumed "moral" position, rather than the immoral one?

Why is the assumed social contract that is unwritten not that you can have the free labor we've released to you so far, but we owe you nothing in the future?

There's too much assumption of the premise that "moral" and "social contract" are terms that make the entitled demands of free-loaders the good guys in this debate. Maybe the better "morality" is the selfless workers giving away the product of their labor for free are the actual good guys.

Where is this mythical social contract found? I stand by my point: it's a software license, not a marriage.

Free users certainly would like it to be a social contract like I would like to be gifted a million dollars. Sadly, I still have to work and can't infinitely rely on the generosity of others.

Where is the contract to return the shopping cart to the corral?

Your analogy doesn't make sense. You are getting benefits from using the shopping cart and you bring back as it's expected as part of the exchange. You bring the cart back to where you took which is a low effort commitment entirely proportional to what you got from it.

Free software developers are gifting you something. Expecting indefinite free work is not mutual respect. That's entitlement.

The common is still there. You have the code. Open source is not a perpetual service agreement. It is not indentured servitude to the community.

Stop trying to guilt trip people into giving you free work.

MinIO accepted contributions from people outside the company who did work on it for free, usually because they expected that minio would keep the software open source.

The last open source version of MinIO didn't disappear when they stopped maintaining it.

In this context the social contract would be an expectation that specifically software developers must return the shopping cart for you, but you would never expect the same from cashiers, construction workers, etc.

If the software developer doesn't return your cart, he betrayed the social contract.

This sounds very manipulative and narcissistic.

I always preferred people who didn’t, when I worked in retail. It generates a nice chill task (wander around the parking lot looking for carts). But if you want to do a favor for the faceless retailer, go for it. Mostly I chuck my cart in the corral to get it out of my way, but this sees more like a morally-neutral action to me.

The social contract is found (and implicitly negotiated) in the interactions between humans, ie: society.

Sounds like you've misunderstood this particular social contract. Luckily several people in this thread have corrected you.

Seems like the interaction that happened here was that they stopped supporting it

No, social contracts require some sort of mutual benefit.

Expectations are maybe fine maybe not, but it's funny that people can slap the word moral onto their expectation of others being obligated to do free work for them, and it's supposed to make them be the good guys here.

Why do you presume to think your definition of morals is shared by everyone? Why is entitlement to others labor the moral position, instead of the immoral position?

> Why is entitlement to others labor the moral position, instead of the immoral position?

You seem to be mistaking me for someone arguing that anyone is entitled to others' labour?

it's still a bait and switch, considering they started removing features before the abandonment.

Users can fork it from point they started removing features. Fully inside social, moral and spiritual contract of open source.

This isn’t about people working for free.

Nobody sensible is upset when a true FOSS “working for free” person hangs up their boots and calls it quits.

The issue here is that these are commercial products that abuse the FOSS ideals to run a bait and switch.

They look like they are open source in their growth phase then they rug pull when people start to depend on their underlying technology.

The company still exists and still makes money, but they stopped supporting their open source variant to try and push more people to pay, or they changed licenses to be more restrictive.

It has happened over and over, just look at Progress Chef, MongoDB, ElasticSearch, Redis, Terraform, etc.

In this particular case, it's the fault of the "abused" for even seeing themselves as such in the first place. Many times it's not even a "bait-and-switch", but reality hitting. But even if it was, just deal with it and move on.

This is definitely the case because the accusations and supposed social contract seem extremely one-sided towards free riding.

Nobody here is saying they should donate the last version of MinIO to the Apache software foundation under the Apache license. Nobody is arguing for a formalized "end of life" exit strategy for company oriented open source software or implying that such a strategy was promised and then betrayed.

The demand is always "keep doing work for me for free".

I’m not even claiming that people who feel thar feel that a social contract has been violated are correct.

I’m saying that the open source rug pull is at this point a known business tactic that is essentially a psychological dark pattern used to exploit.

These companies know they’ll get more traction and sales if they have “open source” on their marketing material. They don’t/never actually intend to be open source long term. They expect to go closed source/source available business lines as soon as they’ve locked enough people into the ecosystem.

Open source maintainers/organizations like the GNU project are happy and enthusiastic about delivering their projects to “freeloaders.” They have a sincere belief that having source code freedom is beneficial to all involved. Even corporate project sponsors share this belief: Meta is happy to give away React because they know that ultimately makes their own products better and more competitive.

Make hay while the sun shines. Be glad that the project happened.

I’m not even claiming that the “abused” are correct to be upset.

The core of my claim is that it’s a shady business tactic because the purpose of it is to gain all the marketing benefits of open source on the front-end (fast user growth, unpaid contributions from users, “street cred” and positive goodwill), then change to source available/business license after the end of the growth phase when users are locked in.

This is not much different than Southwest Airlines spending decades bragging about “bags fly free” and no fees only to pull the rug and dump their customer goodwill in the toilet.

Totally legal to do so, but it’s also totally legal for me to think that they’re dishonest scumbags.

Except in this case, software companies, in my opinion, have this rug pull plan in place from day 1.

> shady business tactic

I'd say it's redundant to consider any business tactic as "shady". The purpose of any business is to make a profit, in any way that's legally permissible. Using the "open source" label is just one way to success, if one plays the game well and mitigates any backlash once they "graduate" and change that license. It's up to any given user going in to be aware that a project they depend on may go in any direction, like it or not, and to always be ready to migrate if deemed necessary.

That’s the myopic view of a business, yes. It works quite well at scale; reference Wal-Mart, Microsoft, et al. It isn’t the only way, though.

H-E-B (or just HEB) is a large, privately-held grocery chain in Texas, and they are beloved by Texans across the societal and political spectrum. They gained and keep this loyalty because they are good neighbors. In the aftermath of hurricanes or floods - of which Texas has many - HEB will be there before FEMA, with water tankers, mobile kitchens and pharmacies, power stations, and so on. They donate 5% of their earnings to local charities, food banks, and education.

It’s possible that HEB would make more money if they slashed these programs and raised prices, but I suspect that instead, people would be outraged at the rug pull, publicly shame them, and a competitor would swoop in and build out replacements.

Sounds like they're a good way on the road to being a social enterprise. A very rare thing indeed.

> bait and switch

Is it really though? They're replacing one product with another, and the replacement comes with a free version.

Free without commercial restrictions? With a real open source license?

Everyone is keying on forced free labor, but that's not really the proposed solution when an open-source project ends. The fact that it ends is a given, the question then is what to do about all the users. Providing an offramp (migration tools that move to another solution that's similar, or even just suggested other solutions, even including your own commercial offering) before closing up shop seems like a decent thing to do.