this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
5 points (85.7% liked)

Self-Hosted Main

515 readers
1 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

For Example

We welcome posts that include suggestions for good self-hosted alternatives to popular online services, how they are better, or how they give back control of your data. Also include hints and tips for less technical readers.

Useful Lists

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
communick@selfhosted.forum
5
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
39 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 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.