I use the fake open source project Minio to store data. It’s an AGPL-licensed S3-compatible server, marketed under the term “open source” for marketing/street cred (despite the AGPL being a nonfree license).
The version RELEASE.2025‑04‑22T22‑12‑26Z includes an administration GUI. The following version does not. It’s of course still available in their paid fork. People are not happy.
They explicitly hobbled their “open source” version to coerce people who don’t want to use their arcane CLI (which is called mc so conveniently name-conflicts with the mc cli utility that many people have installed) to do simple admin tasks.
This sort of shitty behavior from wannabe open source maintainers is user hostile and should be called out regularly. The spirit of open source is so that improvements can be made by anyone and benefit everybody.
Now, Minio have claimed in that thread they’d welcome community contributions to maintain this, and they might even be telling the truth, but they locked the thread after someone expressed disappointment at them vandalizing a working feature in the upstream repository. Anyone who wants to continue to use this working code would have to fork the repository and merge all of the future changes. Or, of course, simply pay Minio, which is what I’m sure they’d prefer.
Many other fake open source projects, however, straight up refuse to merge community implementations of SSO or audit logging because they have a proprietary product alongside that has those features paywalled. I believe a project, at that point, regardless of licensing, should not be called open source. Open source (of course more accurately called “free software”, or “libre software”) is not just a license, it’s an ideology.
Open core is not open source, regardless of what license they use. It’s what I’ve taken to calling “open source cosplay”.
If a project is asking you to assign them copyright in a CLA (GNU notwithstanding), they’re probably doing so to dual license their code. People who believe in software freedoms don’t dual license their code. People who believe in software freedoms don’t release software, any software, under nonfree licenses, such as “Enterprise Editions”.
Open core is bullshit.
Other major offenders:
Stop using these tools.
Before I’m accused of doing the standard open-source-user-entitlement thing, I want to be clear that I’m very much not asking for free software. I’m asking for these companies that are materially benefitting from marketing themselves using the term “open source” to walk the walk. You simply don’t believe in software freedoms if you gate features behind a paywall, or if you (predictably) refuse to merge those same community-implemented features into the “community edition” because you’re anticompetitive and know you can’t compete with free-as-in-beer. If you want to make proprietary software, do so, but stop pretending to be involved in the free software community by using terms like “community” or “project” or “open source” when we all know you’re not.
Mongo (switched to SSPL) and Hashicorp (switched to BSL) and ElasticSearch (SSPL) all did so and, critically, stopped pretending to be open source. The community forked Redis (Valkey) and Terraform (OpenTofu) when the upstreams did this. (Anyone smart enough to fork and maintain a project like this is smart enough to know MongoDB is and has always been shit only that is used by fools who don’t know any better.)
Most projects didn’t take this path, and still call themselves open source when they clearly don’t respect software freedoms at all.
This is dishonest and greedy. Stop pretending to be open source projects when you restrict software freedoms. Admit to yourselves and the world what your ideals and values actually are. You plainly do not believe in the freedom for others to use source code that you have written and published for any purpose they can think up.
Jeffrey Paul is a hacker and security researcher living in Berlin and the founder of EEQJ, a consulting and research organization.