Words are cheap. Google used to write “don’t be evil”. If they are a billionaire, they could easily afford to make this FOSS.

I trust no one. Just put the code in a permissive license so when you eventually cease developing the app or when you turn into adding anti-features there are community forks.

They should allow that. With gpl, the name is protected and that’s all that matters.

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He also says somewhere in the comments that apple simply wouldn't allow this app on the app store. But there's also the option of sideloading, I think that's free no?

Hrmmmm. I'm not certain I'm liking YOUR gratitude, sir or ma'am.

Sounds like a pretty good excuse to me. The code is viewable, which speaks to the privacy and accountability crowd. He allows personal modification, which appeases the tinkerers. The only group it doesn't benefit are the ones trying to make money off of his work by degrading the user experience with ads. Are there better licenses he could have picked to accomplish his goal? Yes. Am I going to go on a Lemmy rant over a dev's choice of license when he's already done so much right? Hell no. It's a win. Take the W and uninstall later if he changes his tune, just like with any other app whether open or closed.

I do agree that true open source is better for everyone as it allows the community to truly own, improve, and evolve the app into the best version of itself. But this is the Privacy group, not the FOSS one. As far as my money is concerned, it ticks the boxes and earned my install. We'll see where it goes from here.

if this company goes out of business the source code dies with it.

Despite the fact that probably none of us had heard of them until today, it appears that FUTO has tremendously deep pockets so are very unlikely to go out of business any time soon (which Rossman mentioned in the comments of his video with a link to this one (that I haven’t yet watched) of his interview with the owner a year ago https://www.youtube.com/live/OJPmbcU-Vzo?si=DovtYTWTC3S1QIY-)

I have found three comments from you, where you insert yourself as an expert on what Open Source is/not is. Although you do link to some sources, you do so without arguing your point. IMO this is not a constructive way of communication. Since I believe your perspective is purist but overall not too helpful, I will go through the trouble an actually argue the point:

Your problem is following sentence published by the OSI: “The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources.” Which FUTO does - they won’t allow you to put ads on top of their software and distribute it. But I hope that you would agree with me that GNU GPL is an Open Source License. However, they do have a copyleft which practically makes selling software impossible. If you use a library which uses the GPL, you have to make your sources available - which makes selling a compiled version a difficult task…

If we look at Wikipedia, we see following sentence: “Generally, open source refers to a computer program in which the source code is available to the general public for use or modification from its original design.”, Grayjay fulfils this. Wikipedia continues: “{…}. Depending on the license terms, others may then download, modify, and publish their version {…}”, you are allowed to download and modify Grayjay. They do not allow you to commercially distribute your modifications, which is a license term.

Lets look at a big OSS company. Red Hat writes: “An open source development model is the process used by an open source community project to develop open source software. The software is then released under an open source license, so anyone can view or modify the source code.” These criteria are fulfilled by the FUTO TEMPORARY LICENSE (Last updated 7 June 2023). Red Hat does not mention the right to redistribute anywhere I could find it.

To those who actually read up to this point: I hope you find this helpful to form your own opinion based on your own research.

They can vary the terms of the license for future commits.

The license seems similar in terms of effect to the MIT license while still giving them control over trademarks and images.

I'd call this a more restrictive form of MIT but not as copyleft as GPL.

Louis Rossman said in his video that this was so people didn't repackage the application with ads and malware. He said it's fair game to recompile and altar it in any other capacity though.

Ohh I see, sounds like more of a principled reason then if i'm understanding you correctly

Edit: while Louis is accepting feedback on the license specifically, I doubt the project will move to something relicensable, since Louis specifically picked this license to prevent what is happening to NewPipe and the spread of malware using his name to gain trust. He's also been burned a lot during the R2R stuff with unforseen loopholes abused by rival lobbyists, so the FUTO license is probably looking at things from a protectionist perspective, not as an individual from the FOSS community.

I've only heard of one OSS project relicensing in recent times, and they had to reach out to each individual contributor for written permission, hopefully this rings a bell for someone here because I can't remember the project name…

Yeah a Piped option would be pretty great tbh, and probably most people wouldn’t notice the additional latency maybe?

The lesser of two evils is Android as it's like they put closed-source software on top of open source software (see AOSP) whereas on iPhone it's all closed.

There are Linux phones, like the Pinephone and postmarketOS, but they're not as polished as Andrpoid and iOS

GrapheneOS?

alternative app stores are only supposed to be in eu

apple is looking forward to region lock this side loading facility

apple sucks for many reasons but this is just blatant fanboy mudslinging lol. i use plenty of foss on my apple devices, mainly mac

Apple and FOSS is dedinitely an antithesis but it's kinda rude to disapprove Apple that heavily, even though I'm a hater too.

There are definitely foss apps on iOS and you can sideload without jailbreaking to access more foss apps. Any amount of foss is good regardless of what OS is used.

FOSS acts as a layer that protects users from the devolopers.

…What?

I have found three comments from you, where you insert yourself as an expert on what Open Source is/not is. Although you do link to some sources, you do so without arguing your point. IMO this is not a constructive way of communication. Since I believe your perspective is purist but overall not too helpful, I will go through the trouble an actually argue the point:

Your problem is following sentence published by the OSI: “The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources.” Which FUTO does - they won’t allow you to put ads on top of their software and distribute it. But I hope that you would agree with me that GNU GPL is an Open Source License. However, they do have a copyleft which practically makes selling software impossible. If you use a library which uses the GPL, you have to make your sources available - which makes selling a compiled version a difficult task…

If we look at Wikipedia, we see following sentence: “Generally, open source refers to a computer program in which the source code is available to the general public for use or modification from its original design.”, Grayjay fulfils this. Wikipedia continues: “{…}. Depending on the license terms, others may then download, modify, and publish their version {…}”, you are allowed to download and modify Grayjay. They do not allow you to commercially distribute your modifications, which is a license term.

Lets look at a big OSS company. Red Hat writes: “An open source development model is the process used by an open source community project to develop open source software. The software is then released under an open source license, so anyone can view or modify the source code.” These criteria are fulfilled by the FUTO TEMPORARY LICENSE (Last updated 7 June 2023). Red Hat does not mention the right to redistribute anywhere I could find it.

To those who actually read up to this point: I hope you find this helpful to form your own opinion based on your own research.