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Comment on FUTO Keyboard: The Discussion Behind A Cool Product

mke@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

Depends on what you mean by trust. This wasn’t made any clearer by reading the article.

“We promise not to do bad things” is not a safe long term contract. If they can change the terms at any moment and retain control, then they can break that promise and that’s final.

This is why open source matters. This is why we shouldn’t let people try to change the meaning open source. True open source is forever open, it’s the author’s Ulysses pact.

FUTO keyboard is source available, and that’s also final. Whether it is also “source first” and if that term is worth recognizing at all is a separate and discussion.

Can there be a trusted space between open and closed souece? Maybe, I don’t see why not. Again, define trust, and who’s judging. Some people already trust closed source proprietary software, for some reason, while others strongly reject anything that isn’t free software—remember, we’re not talking about price, here.

I wish FUTO and Rossman all the best, as I do with the free software ecosystem and most of open source. Open source is open source, though, let’s not get it twisted.

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sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Exactly. I use and enjoy FUTO Keyboard and Grayjay, but I’m under no illusion about them being open source, they’re source available. I think they’re great products and great alternatives to proprietary software, but until it’s released under a proper FOSS license, I will be keeping my eye out for credible alternatives.

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- stepan@lemmy.cafe ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  You might like HeliBoard licensed under GPLv3. I’ve been using it for several months and I really like it. Sadly, for swipe-typing you need to load proprietary library.
  
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  - mke@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Currently using HB as well and it’s really nice. I’d like to try out FlorisBoard in the future, after they’ve reached some of their milestones. It seems like it’d be even nicer… If only it made more progress. Not complaining, though, I’ll wait as long as they need.
    
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  - sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Cool, I’ll try it out! Thanks!
    
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gedaliyah@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Outside of software spaces the discussion around copyright seems so much more nuanced. Any creative commons license is generally considered “copyleft” regardless of the details, and some are far more restrictive than the FUTO license. Consider projects like Wikipedia which accept content licensed under GDFL, or CC-BY, or CC-BY-SA, Apache 2.0, or PD.

I am not a programmer, so maybe I am missing a huge piece of context, but what is the insistence in the free software community for what seems like total license purity? I even see software engineers arguing that “everyone” should use Apache or MIT and not the other, which is somehow bad for the FOSS community. What am I missing? Isn’t more free better than less free?

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- mke@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I might not be the best person to explain this, but I believe you’re misunderstanding.
  
  Outside of software spaces the discussion around copyright seems so much more nuanced.
  
  Inside software spaces, specific needs beget specific discussions. They are as nuanced as they need to be.
  
  Did you know [Creative Commons] themselves recommend against using CC licenses for software?
  
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  - gedaliyah@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Thank you - I would love to read any resources that you have
    
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    mke@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Well, that’s wonderful to read!
    
    If you’re wondering what sort of issue being careless with licenses can cause, see the (in)famous case of Tivoization. GPL 3 was written partly to solve issues like this.
    
    The Free Software Foundation explicitly forbade tivoization in version 3 of the GNU General Public License.
    Wikipedia
    
    For a more recent example of how community/contributors and owner/company interest misalignment can make a huge mess, see the consequences of HashiCorp changing the Terraform license from MPL to BUSL. Relevant facts I’d like to note:
    
    This caused a large split in the community and with HC (“drama”)
    
    This was only possible due to their CLA (Contributor License Agreement) requirement for contributors.
    
    This eventually resulted in the birth of OpenTofu, a fork of Terraform managed by the Linux Foundation.
    
    Or, for a lighter case:
    
    A while back I saw a project on GitHub licensed as CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. The developer was considering writing a guide for contributors, even though I’m pretty sure you can’t fork and modify it to open a PR (popular way to offer contributions), because that’d break the ND clause (sharing derivatives). Were people supposed to e-mail the developer with patches? Who knows! There are people into that, like the Linux Kernel folks.
    
    And finally, here’s what I thought was a very interesting take on what free means when talking about software licenses, touching upon obligations, rights and copyleft.
    
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