Quick shout-out to Grayjay: An app to watch videos on any platform - reducing the power of individual services. The Software is open-source and can be found here: https://gitlab.futo.org/videostreaming/grayjay
I will test this out for myself and hope someone here finds this useful.
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:
Our Three Pledges
We will never sell out. All FUTO companies and FUTO-funded projects are expected to remain fiercely independent. They will never exacerbate the monopoly problem by selling out to a monopolist.
We will never abuse our customers. All FUTO companies and FUTO-funded projects are expected to maintain an honest relationship with their customers. Revenue, if it exists, comes from customers paying directly for software and services. “The users are our product” revenue models are strictly prohibited.
We will always be transparently devoted to making delightful software. All FUTO-funded projects are expected to be open-source or develop a plan to eventually become so. No effort will ever be taken to hide from the people what their computers are doing, to limit how they use them, or to modify their behavior through their software.
(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.
I trust Louis Rossman not to do that. He explained the only reason for the current license is to prevent people forking the app and putting it on the Play store with ads
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.
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?
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.
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.
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-)
Still i would argue that it is open source, since it is open for everyone to see.
You are mistaken. Please read The Open Source Definition and the Open-source software wikipedia article, and then kindly edit your post to remove the inaccurate statement “The Software is open-source”.
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.
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.
What’s wrong with the FUTO license?
AFAICT, the only restrictions are you cannot make money off it, and you can’t pretend to be the official app. Very similar to the Mozilla license, although Mozilla’s has some extra bits to be compliant with releasing on the App Store, which has its own licensing requirements that is not met by any version of the GPL
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…
App looks legitimately amazing. Seems a bit buggy in alpha but I’m sure it’ll be ironed out. I just hope they look into supporting Piped instead of directly connecting to YouTube, as well as SponsorBlock. Once they get those 2 things and iron out some of the bugs, I’ll primarily use it for sure. Its a great concept.
Wouldn’t interacting through Piped just introduce an additional communication layer, which makes interacting with YT slower? I see your argument with Piped, but what would be the pros of using Piped which outweighs the additional communication costs?
Pro would just be not directly connecting through Google/YouTube servers, and instead using a proxy. Its a nice privacy benefit. I agree it could make things slower, so I don’t think it should completely replace direct connection with YouTube, but I just think the option would be nice to have.
I wish somewhere on their site or anywhere in that description they’d say “Android App”.
I was a little disappointed as an iOS user browsing their site trying to find the iOS App Store link 😬.
Edit: I appreciate the advice to switch to Android but I really wasn’t asking. 😅
All you can hope is that some day they are forced to support 3rd party apps because of some anti monopoly lawsuit telling them they have too.
But good luck with that, Apple is very powerful and can probably just buy out the right lawyers and judges in that situation.
Or if they were forced to it would have an Apple twist on it like they get to approve the 3rd party app stores that are allowed or something.
Just get an Android phone you can put a custom ROM on and you’ll have a very good experience.
All you can hope is that some day they are forced to support 3rd party apps because of some anti monopoly lawsuit telling them they have too.
I’m not sure if you are aware already but the reason Epic are announcing a million changes to their business is that the previous business plan was based around them successfully throwing a fortune at suing Apple to force them to support 3rd party apps and they tried and failed.
I think if it were ever going to happen that way, Epic would have succeeded.
That’s not to say it won’t still happen one day through political means. Seems plausible the EU might force it at some stage.
