My creds: Been in open source for 25 years, one of the earlier users of Ubuntu when it launched in Fourways, South Africa (remember those sleeved CDs they used to send for installation media) though I hardcore rep Debian, have deployed and supported countless tools across 3 continents, the most memorable being Mambo which later became Joomla, though I switched to Drupal.

I think the label has been hijacked by many corporations to front an ethical FOSS front but in reality release a hobbled version of their software that is inherently open source at the core, but, has a commercial hard gate around certain things, like scalability/performance/high availability, authentication and security (big yikes here), integrations, usability, reporting and analytics etc… you get where I am going with this. I respect that people have to do what they have to do to eat and grow, but there is blatant misrepresentation happening and it needs to be called out. Or maybe I am wrong here?

  • davel [he/him]
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    1 day ago

    Yes, some free/freemium products mislead or straight-up lie. Check the source code and the license(s). In some cases the fee version is open source but the premium version is neither open nor even source-available. AlternativeTo lets you filter based on Open Source, Free, and Paid.