this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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What is a self-hosted app/os/service/ect that is widely "known" as being fully open source, but it actually relies significantly on closed source software? (alien.top)
submitted 11 months ago by AllTheModzAreCancer@alien.top to c/main@selfhosted.forum
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I was looking into Tailscale which I thought to be complexly open source, but it turns out that their coordination server is closed source. If you want to run your own open source coordination server, Headscale is the go-to option.

This is no fault of their own (as they freely express this in their FAQ) it's just that I had always been told by people that Tailscale was fully open source. This got me wondering what else is not as open source as people widely accept it to be?

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[–] Illustrious-Many-782@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I'd count OnlyOffice in that group.

[–] d_maes@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Quick scroll through their github tells me they are OSS, some things under AGPL and some under Apache2. What makes you think they aren't?

[–] Illustrious-Many-782@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

Well, it's more attitude than verbatim licensing, which is the reason the Nextcloud originally tried to partner with them, then immediately changed to Collabora. Some issues:

  1. There's a user limit in the open version. This itself makes it more like a freemium model than open source.
  2. Mobile editing and other features continue to be removed.

I'll just say that while it's technically FOSS, it's not community open source. There's a company that writes it all and open sources a portion of what they write. The company isn't FOSS friendly and continues to squeeze. It's not too much different to why MySQL got forked.