The shocking part was less about Maven's methods or lack of ethics, and more along the lines of "How the fuck did they do that?!"
Oh wow, how did I miss this?!
Congratulations! I've been around for roughly the same amount of time, and it's wild to see how much things have changed.
I still miss old Identi.ca, though.
Most of the backlash pertains to the board members appointed to the new nonprofit. One of the members is a lawyer that has defended crypto and AI companies, another is ex-Twitter angel investor Biz Stone.
Mastodon's community usually has some kind of vague beef about one thing or another when it comes to Eugen and the decisions he makes for the project, whether it's a new feature or a design change or that he didn't do something that other projects wanted to do.
Nextcloud is a fork of Owncloud. IMO, as a product Nextcloud is superior in every way.
It actually does have that nowadays, it's just that the feature requires Elasticsearch to work, which is one extra piece of infra for admins to worry about.
Yeah, if you read the article, Hometown and Glitch actually get mentioned. The criticism is not about making a fork to do your own thing... but, instead, about trying to compete with Mastodon directly.
Doing that kind of fork (which is what people are calling for) requires a tremendous amount of coordination, effort, and commitment that cannot be done casually.
This is a situation that I think will get better in time. There's some really promising efforts involving Fediverse Enhancement Proposals, where multiple projects collaborate on shared ways of doing things. Some of these behaviors are getting studied and standardized by the larger SocialCG entity, as well.
There's also a lot of promising development behind a Fediverse Testing Suite. If we can develop a platform-agnostic testing system for people to build against, it will potentially become the new development standard, rather than optimizing for Mastodon and nothing else.
While I think shareholders can be a driving factor, I see it way more often with VC-funded companies. The "2.5x year over year" growth mantra that places like YCombinator stipulate have disastrous effects on small tech companies. Often, these startups have an incentive to keep taking additional funding rounds, which appears to tighten the grip the VC has over them.
Try growing the next Microsoft or Google or Amazon out of that model. I'm not convinced that it's possible. At least if you bootstrap your own company, you don't have the same binding obligations...even if it takes way longer to get to a place that's self-sustaining.
Honestly, this really resonated with me. Running an open source project on its own can be hard, running a popular one that gets used by tons of people and companies, while giving free labor, is extremely hard. Acting as free tech support to a large company, for nothing in return, is ass. Full stop.
I've seen some people make the statement that "maintainers owe you nothing", and I've seen people state that "your supporters owe you nothing."
While I believe there's nothing wrong in a person willingly running a project on their own terms, just as there's nothing wrong with refusing donations and doing the work out of some kind of passion... there's only so many hours in the day, and developers need to feed themselves and pay rent.
I think a lot of people would love to be able to work on open source full-time. I'd devote all of my energy and focus to it, if I could. But, that's a reality only for a privileged few, and many of them still have to make compromises. The CEO and founder of Mastodon, for example, makes a pittance compared to what a corporate junior developer makes.
Sentry also did this by embracing the Business Source License. Technically, you can still get an MIT-licensed version, but it has to be more than two years old.
As a former employee that worked there during the days that Sentry really promoted itself being Open Source, it was disappointing to see. VC Funding and a growth obsession basically poisoned the well.
Great job! We just gave you a shout-out on We Distribute: https://wedistribute.org/2024/07/canvas-2024-live/
It's seriously awesome that you got this to work with more than just Lemmy. The app is looking great, and it seems like you're off to a strong start!