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Grayjay is not Open Source (hiphish.github.io)
submitted 1 year ago by rglullis@communick.news to c/foss@beehaw.org

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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[-] rglullis@communick.news 2 points 1 year ago

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.

this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
137 points (100.0% liked)

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