this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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Privacy
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It's viewable source, the license does not allow modification and distribution of the modifications. The license also reserves the right to be revoked at any time.
It's source available, but it is not what most people would consider open source in the common usage.
Exactly. Beware of the inevitable enshittification down the line. Once they have the market share, they have no reason not to close their source
Futo (the organisation developing this app) appears to be a tech billionaire (Eron Wolf) firing his money at the tech industry until it stops being so shit.
This is from the about page on their website:
(From: https://futo.org/what-is-futo/)
What they say and what they will do could of course differ but they do go to great pains to paint themselves as fundamentally opposed to be sort of action you are worried about.
Words are cheap. Google used to write "don't be evil". If they are a billionaire, they could easily afford to make this FOSS.
He says in the video on yt that you can fork it and modify it however you want for personal use no problem. You just can't make money distributing it I think.
So basically no chance of it coming to iOS. Given that even open source apps have options to purchase donations in the iOS app, cause developers can’t eat gratitude
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?
Sideloading on iOS is free but a total PITA. There is little incentive to build an app for such a small userbase
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.
He says in the video it is this way so they can legally pursue forks with malware and advertisements.
Youtube fails to fight its clones and you think they will succeed? It's only disuasive
I see where you are coming from. Still i would argue that it is open source, since it is open for everyone to see.
The explanation for this more restrictive license was that they want to prevent what happened to newpipe. Some ppl repackaged newpipe with additional crap, put ads on it etc. They want to have the legal geounds to combat these things.
While I don't think, they would go against me for forking it and tweaking things here and there - they have the legal ground to do so...
Their license allows you to modify it, just not to distribute your modifications. For now.
By the strictest technical definition of the term open source I agree with you.
But in the cultural zeitgeist it is not open source and that it can't be used by other projects, people can't tinker with it and improve it downstream, if this company goes out of business the source code dies with it. At least legally.
The Microsoft Windows source code is available, if you sign an NDA, and it's been leaked a couple times online. So if you really want to, Microsoft Windows is source available with some hurdles. But I wouldn't consider it open source - mostly because it cannot contribute to the ecosystem evolving.
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-)
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/live/OJPmbcU-Vzo?si=DovtYTWTC3S1QIY-
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.