OSS-Blacklist
codeberg.org
A list of companies that are hostile towards the open source community

Just saw the discussion around the Haier Home Assistant takedown and thought it would be good to materialize the metaphorical blacklist.

  • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
    2·
    10 months ago

    Should add Reddit. Started out as FOSS, closed down their GitHub, then killed their API which killed dozens of third party integrations impacting hundreds of thousands of users.

  • bluegandalf@lemmy.ml
    1·
    10 months ago

    It might be a good idea to do the exact opposite I.e. make a OSS whitelist. It will be much easier to maintain given the scale of applications/services/products.

    • akrot@lemmy.world
      1·
      10 months ago

      Although I agree, it’s tough to make a whitelist than a blacklist, as the latter requires only 1 bad decision, the former is tough to assess (how many good decision to be on the list, ex Microsoft support lots of open source projects, should they be added?)

  • nilloc@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    Add Haier to the list. They’re threatening Homekit devs and issued a takedown on a GitHub hosted HVAC controller for their units. Citing it hurting their income (I assume they mean data mining income when you stop letting them monitor your appliances online).

    The dev is looking for a lawyer to consult, and wants to fight, so has probably not got any copyright infringing code in his repo.

    Oh and for boycotting purposes, they sell appliances under the brands: Haier, Casarte, Leader, GE Appliances, Fisher & Paykel, Aqua and Candy.

  • BlanK0@lemmy.ml
    1·
    10 months ago

    I really like seeing codeberg being used more.

    Also I’m definitely keeping my eyes on this repo once in a while 👀🧐🍵

  • thesmokingman@programming.dev
    1·
    10 months ago

    It’s probably a good idea to have a stronger definition and mission. Here are a few scenarios you should consider.

    • FSF defines anything that’s not copyleft as hostile. That’s most companies. I personally don’t think I can tell my users what to do with my software other than remove my liability so I vehemently disagree with Stallman.
    • Mongo wrote the SSPL and MariaDB wrote the BSL. Both licenses are seen as regressions. I personally respect the MariaDB case and have been harassed by too many Mongo salespeople to say the same about them.
    • Platforms like AWS are the reason companies like CockroachDB and Elastic implemented restrictive licenses.
    • IBM has been gutting open source through its acquisition of Red Hat. This is a common story; Oracle has been screwing *nix longer.
    • Protecting trademarks causes a lot of consternation from users. The Rust Foundation is the most recent example of this I remember blowing up the FOSS community.

    I like your idea a lot. I think it needs some definition to be very successful!