#Macfusion alternative free

And that's why we're where we are with these conversations: it's not the end-user free riders who matter, it's the commercial ones.

#Macfusion alternative software

The only sustainable way to build open-source software is to get businesses to pay for it. And a lot of people pfft at that and wave their hands about their right to other people's free time (or that an invisible hand will Make Things Work should those people choose to spend their free time in other ways, ignoring that that usually just means other people get to burn out instead). You have to give people something of value, even if nominal value, to actually get corporate interest and to drive the kind of ROI that makes it viable to continue spending so much dang time on these projects. The only conclusion I've been able to draw is that literally every approach from OpenCollective to a PayPal link demonstrably does not work.

I have researched this extensively, talked to a few dozen medium-to-large OSS maintainers, and have a project on the back burner about this. So this is an area of significant interest to me. Due to the difficulties of building and signing the kernel extension across all of the versions of macOS that it supports, just having the source available but keeping the binaries under a proprietary license would probably be sufficient to make it worth the while of most companies to license with him to provide custom builds like we do. I'd really rather he kept the project open source, and continued to provide custom builds for companies on a contract basis.

#Macfusion alternative code

I don't believe that he is scaling much better with his commercial licensing than he was as a FLOSS maintainer.Īs it is, we're fairly happy with his work to continue to support new versions of macOS, which is fairly hard to ship systems software on these days (the code signing and notarization requirements keep getting more and more onerous, system integrity protection keeps getting in the way of debugging, and so on), but it would be nice if we weren't limited to a single person working on the project. He does reliably ship us new builds, but it has sometimes been a little difficult to get him to respond to feature requests or even patches that we send him. I work for a company which pays him to build branded versions of FUSE for macOS, and has been doing so for several years. > He's been the sole maintainer on the project since 2012 and has never been compensated for it Given that the alternative was to abandon the project, the only way it was going to see continued development as an OSS project was is if others took over maintenance/development of it, which anyone is free to do by creating and maintaining a fork. So he's just exercising the same BSD rights that all the other companies who have been taking and commercializing his work and not contributing back any fixes or funding for continued development. However, what I'm asking for is for companies, that are selling FUSE-based products or rebrand FUSE and bundle it with their apps, to re-invest some of the profits in the continued development of FUSE on macOS, if they can afford it. > I will never ask end users for financial support.

He's been the sole maintainer on the project since 2012 and has never been compensated for it, he says it will always be free to end users but wants companies that are financially benefiting from it to help sponsor continued development : I did read about how he has to close source the software and how this software can hardly be continued open source or is difficult to be a collective work because of the signature issue, but that doesn't make using macFUSE less scary.Likely the best outcome for the project barring company sponsorship that pays him to continue working on it as OSS. One of the only few arguments is that the developer 'Benjamin Fleischer' is reputable. I try to search on the internet to find out if macFUSE is indeed safe to use, but I failed. It's quite a lot, but not at a level that I would trust or make me feel like the source code has been widely reviewed. There are only 7.9k stars on GitHub (2023 March). I would be more comfortable using it if macFUSE is developed or reviewed by many other developers, but there is only one contributor listed on GitHub, and articles are saying that the recent releases have become closed-source. I'm not an expert on macOS or operating systems, but as far as I read on the internet, it doesn't sound safe and it is not recommended by Apple. MacFUSE is a requirement for VeraCrypt on MacOS.īut installing macFUSE honestly sounds so scary.