Feature Request: Add a tag to identify commercial "open source projects"

[tuaris]

There's a nasty habit among commercial SaaS organizations to claim they have an "open source" project. Where in fact this open source project (while in some cases is useful), is nothing more than an advertising platform for their commercial service. I won't single anyone out here, but there are countless examples of this practice. Many of which are listed on Awsome Selfhosted.

I think the criteria is simple, if there's a paid option, then it gets the tag.

[nodiscc]

• The Free Software philosophy and guidelines explicitely allow selling Free Software.
• Many solutions listed here will have a "hosted" offering for people who don't want to bother self-hosting the service/don't have the required skills, and as a way to financially support development. There is nothing wrong with that and we won't add a tag ("if there's a paid option, then it gets the tag") for this.
• Some projects will have multiple tiers such as "community" and "enterprise" (paid) editions, with advanced features only being present in the paid edition. This is also fine, as long as the Free edition is not artificially crippled (such as limiting the number of users or otherwise violating the DFSG/Four Essential Freedoms). In addition, these projects always provide (or don't they?) a full comparison table of the different offerings and anyone can make a decision based on their own needs.

The Anti-features tag is inspired from https://f-droid.org/docs/Anti-Features/, and we currently use only one possible variety (Depends on non-free services), but there are varieties of anti-features that are specific to self-hosted software, such as locking security features behind a paid edition (the infamous https://sso.tax/). I think we could add an anti-feature tag for this kind of limitation - if you can think of other specific cases/varieties, please tell.

I'm also in favor of clearly naming projects XYZ Community Edition or similar when there are multiple editions, which gives a hint straight away to people who'd like to avoid these solutions.

I won't single anyone out here, but there are countless examples of this practice.

As long as it's constructive, well-sourced and not emotional ("I'm mad because Gitlab CE doesn't provide security dashboards and geo-replicated setup"), why not? If it helps establishing clearly defined and fair criteria for such tags, of course. For example while Gitlab is notorious for the extreme difference in features between different editions [1], the base edition is fully functional and there are no arbitrary limits (as in "going out of their way to prevent you from using the software" - which directly goes against Freedom 0 - such software won't even be listed at all). But this is one example where I think it should be explicitly named Community Edition in the list.

[tuaris]

• The Free Software philosophy and guidelines explicitly allow selling Free Software.

  • Many solutions listed here will have a "hosted" offering for people who don't want to bother self-hosting the service/don't have the required skills, and as a way to financially support development. There is nothing wrong with that and we won't add a tag ("if there's a paid option, then it gets the tag") for this.

I agree that in the most genuine cases there's nothing wrong with doing this. I completely understand that there will always be people who can't or don't want to self host. The motivation behind this request is for people (including myself) who wish to have a 100% pure open source solution that's not influenced by commercial interests, share holders, and the desire/need to bring in revenue.

It also helps weed out shady actors where the primary intent is to build a commercial product by leveraging the community as free labor. Only to then switch to a completely commercial restrictive license once the product has matured and gained critical mass. I believe it helps a person make informed decisions and possibly be better prepared for situations like with what happened to Terraform, Redis, and Elasticsearch. Those are recent examples, but similar things have been occurring for years/decades.

I won't single anyone out here, but there are countless examples of this practice.

As long as it's constructive, well-sourced and not emotional ("I'm mad because Gitlab CE doesn't provide security dashboards and geo-replicated setup"), why not? If it helps establishing clearly defined and fair criteria for such tags, of course. For example while Gitlab is notorious for the extreme difference in features between different editions [1], the base edition is fully functional and there are no arbitrary limits (as in "going out of their way to prevent you from using the software" - which directly goes against Freedom 0 - such software won't even be listed at all). But this is one example where I think it should be explicitly named Community Edition in the list.

Nextcloud, Netdata, Grafana, Sentry etc.. all are wonderful open source projects I use personally and love. So there isn't any emotion or bias here. However, in the case of Netdata and Sentry (just two random examples), it's pretty obvious that the intent is to sell a SaaS subscription. I even confronted Netdata a few months back about this. It is very difficult to locate the "community edition" download area (they fixed it). Even today, the community edition has dark UI patterns in place (by default) that lead you towards the SaaS product.

I think a tag to help identity whether or not something is "pure" open source or commercially supported open source could be a good thing.

[nodiscc]

@tuaris hi, sorry for the late reply

Nextcloud, Netdata, Grafana, Sentry

• Nextcloud: nothing wrong with it to my knowledge, there aren't even different editions, the Entreprise offering just adds support/consulting services for large deployments. The feature set is exactly the same.
• Netdata: not listed here (it's in the Monitoring section which is delegated to awesome-sysadmin), but now definitely non-free. I got personally bit by it. It wouldn't even qualify for awesome-selfhosted since the non-free dashboard arbitrarily limits the number of monitored nodes.
• Grafana: not listed here (awesome-sysadmin); but I don't see any kind of limitation for the self-hosted Grafana, all feature tiers apply only to the SaaS offering, unless I'm missing something?
• Sentry: not listed here, uses BUSL so definitely non-free.

"pure" open source

Either something respects the freedoms of Free and Open-Source Software, or it doesn't. I wouldn't personally use some of the software listed here based on "gut feeling" (should have seen it coming for Netdata, all the signs were there as you said), but we're not going to add a label based on that, are we?

It's always been "policy" that users of the list should do "due diligence" and do their own research before investing time in a solution. We provide some guardrails (anti-features, removal of abandoned or insecure projects).

A blanket "entreprise-backed = bad" label is not the way to go, too much work to review, too subjective, too punitive (a lot of companies provide FOSS solutions in good faith).

If you have concerns about a specific project not being "awesome" anymore, the better way is to open an issue about it, stating exactly what is wrong, and then we may go from there.

Agree?