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Grayjay is not Open Source (hiphish.github.io)

submitted 1 year ago by rglullis to c/foss@beehaw.org

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Today FUTO released an application called Grayjay for Android-based mobile phones. Louis Rossmann introduced the application in a video (YouTube link). Grayjay as an application is very promising, but there is one point I take issue with: Grayjay is not an Open Source application. In the video Louis explains his reason behind the custom license, and while I do agree with his reason, I strong disagree with his method. In this post I will explain what Open Source means, how Grayjay does not meet the criteria, why this is an issue, and how it can be solved.

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[–] madkarlsson@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

If the people selling are passing someone else's work as their own, that's stealing. Otherwise, it's just Free Software working as intended.

Do you not see the contradiction in this statement? Where do you find the line of what is stealing and "working as intented"?

If someone is writing software but wants to prevent redistribution, then go ahead and make a license that forbids it. But then don't get to call it "Open Source" or anything like that.

There are so many licenses for this model already, I'm inclined to believe that you havent actually published any OSS yourself and your attitude in these threads are mildly said, off putting.

I am a big fan of OSI and support their work, but you are treating them (based in what i can read in this thread) like some holy, all defining entity, of what is open source. They are not, and true open source, cannot, and should not, ever derive its power from a central agency setting rules and definitions. If that happens, that will be the end of open source.

Please stop gatekeeping OSS, it hurts all of us

Edit: some autocomplete stupid grammar

[–] rglullis 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There are so many licenses for this model already,

Open Source != "Source available". The whole point is that distinction is important, and there are plenty of companies now (MongoDB, Elastic and more recently Hashicorp) that are trying to claim to be "Open Source", but in fact use licenses that prevent redistribution and impose conditions to use, which means that they are definitely not open.

I’m inclined to believe that you havent actually published any OSS yourself .

There you go. You can find projects that I've done for myself, projects that I've done while working for companies with real open source products, small libraries that were not core to the company and I convinced them to open source...

You know what they all have in common? All these licenses (MIT, GPL, AGPL) adopting allow code re-use, modification and redistribution.

Please stop gatekeeping OSS, it hurts all of us

First: please don't use the Royal We. It's a cheap rhetoric trick.

Second: you know what really hurts me. Companies that use "Open source" as a marketing point and to build community but remove freedoms when it's no longer in their interests.

[–] madkarlsson@beehaw.org 0 points 1 year ago

But I never used a royal "We", in fact "we" was never used in my text at all. I used us, to refer to all the other comments that you can note does not agree with your assessment of open source.

Instead of you arguing my "cheap rhetorical skills", how about you actually answer more than, estimated, a fifth of my statements? How about you stop with your own victimization of " what really hurts me". Because that, in essence, is actually cheap rhetorics.

I fully agree that when companies do this, that it is disgusting. But you have to take a step back and look at the actual effect. This is not by any means new, it happened likely before I was even conceived.

What would you say your point is. To shame grayjoy or make a point that this is a threat to open source? Both? Neither?

[–] amki@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Do you not see the contradiction in this statement? Where do you find the line of what is stealing and “working as intented”?

If you redistribute someone else's open source code as open source but change nothing why would I get it from you and not the original developer? There is no incentive and no reward to "steal".

If you make enough changes to create additional value I might and then it is "working as intended"