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Comment on Rule 2 Clarifications and New Rule proposal I’ve gotten through (I believe) a

i_am_not_a_robot@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

Are Home Assistant and Frigate exempted? Home Assistant is free and open source and you can self host it, but there is a built-in feature where you can pay a subscription to use Nabu Casa’s ingress server and cloud GPUs, and many of the integrations are only useful if you have paid money for some piece of hardware or have a subscription to a cloud service. Frigate is free and open source, but it has built-in support for specially packaged computer vision models that are offered for a fee that supports the project. I wouldn’t consider either application crippleware, but you can pay money to people who are affiliated with the project for a direct benefit that is related to the software.

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curbstickle@anarchist.nexus ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Great question.

To be clear, this is about promo posts, and has nothing to do with discussing either of these projects.

So if HA decided to come in here and promo… Yes, that would be under the exemption, thats not a feature limitation but an add-on service. HA is not limited in any way by the subscription option with nabu casa.

Frigate on the other hand I don’t think would fall under the exemption. You can’t load models yourself - a feature specifically limited by subscription. If frigate devs came in to promote themselves, they would not fall under the exemption.

Again, either project (and closed source commercial projects) still can be discussed or posted about, this is specifically promo posting.

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- i_am_not_a_robot@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  You can load models for Frigate yourself, and the documentation tells you how to do it, but the recommended Frigate+ models are easier to use. For example, downloading and configuring YOLO-NAS becomes just copying and pasting a plus:// URL when you’re signed in to Frigate+.
  
  As another example, I would consider GitLab not to be free because GitLab is a for-profit company, the open source version of GitLab intentionally lacks features that would be particularly useful to business users, and you can pay GitLab to get those features in a special GitLab distribution distributed under difference licensing terms. If GitLab had a plugin model, and unaffiliated developers created paid plugins for those features, then I think GitLab itself could be considered free. But if paid plugins were developed by the same developers, would that make it not free again?
  
  More strange examples:
  
  Redis, which relicensed to a non-Free license in 2024, but would have still been usable by most people who are self hosting. Redis is available under AGPL since 2025.
  
  All Hashicorp software, such as Terraform and Vault, which relicensed to a non-Free license in 2023, but is still usable for most people who are self hosting.
  
  Docker, which is only free on Linux since it relicensed in 2022. Docker Engine only runs on Linux, but the closed-source Docker Desktop runs Docker Engine in a Linux VM and wraps the API to make it almost seamless on Windows and Mac OS, and for that you may need to pay a subscription.
  
  I guess to me it seems like there’s this gray area where you start having to think about intention and whether the software is really intended to be usable for the purposes that people in this community will want to use it for without having to pay the person doing the promoting.
  
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  - curbstickle@anarchist.nexus ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    
    You can load models for Frigate yourself, and the documentation tells you how to do it, but the recommended Frigate+ models are easier to use.
    
    Ah, that didn’t used to be the case. Or it changed quickly? I don’t recall tbh, but “easier to use” wouldn’t bar self-promo in that case, since you can load the models.
    
    Redis, which relicensed to a non-Free license in 2024, but would have still been usable by most people who are self hosting. Redis is available under AGPL since 2025.
    
    Not really weird, since v8 its AGPL, so its a fully open license. Prior license isn’t relevant.
    
    All Hashicorp software, such as Terraform and Vault, which relicensed to a non-Free license in 2023, but is still usable for most people who are self hosting.
    
    Not a free license. No self-promo. OpenTofu? Totally fine (and personally recommended btw)
    
    Docker, which is only free on Linux since it relicensed in 2022. Docker Engine only runs on Linux, but the closed-source Docker Desktop runs Docker Engine in a Linux VM and wraps the API to make it almost seamless on Windows and Mac OS, and for that you may need to pay a subscription.
    
    Docker desktop - no self promo. Docker, promo OK.
    
    I’m not seeing the complexity.
    
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