[deleted]
GrayJay is an app associated with Louis Rossmann and lot of people seems to like him and therefore has gotten lot of traction lately but there is something you should know. This app is not open source even though source may be available. The app is not licensed in any existing open source license such as GPL, BSD, or MIT, etc. The source license is basically does not allow freedom of redistribution of modified code so therefore it fails the minimal definition of open source. Louis Rossmann has gone on the record on video saying he will sue people if someone were to do something with code he does not approve of whatever that means. Number of people have tried to tell him not to call GrayJay an open source app but he simply ignored them. It’s pretty clear he is now just calling this app open source for marketing purposes which I think is purposely misleading and deceptive.
If you want to buy the app because you find it useful and you don’t care about open source, that’s perfectly fine. However if you believe that supporting an open source ecosystem is part of the reason for supporting GrayJay, then you should know what’s really happening here.
autonomoususer@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Warning, GrayJay fails to include a libre software license text file. We do not control it, anti-libre software.
Ulrich@feddit.org 1 week ago
But being libre doesn’t make it anti-libre.
autonomoususer@lemmy.world 1 week ago
‘Open source’ is a very ambiguous, confusing, phrase that makes it too easy to get scammed out of libre software (and ‘closed source’ and proprietary).
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 1 week ago
Don't they? I'm aware of the events that took place when they released it. But seems they've solved licensing by now. There is a License.md in that repo since a few months. FUTO seems to even have written blog posts about their licensing, detailing why they do it. In short: They like to call it open source, while it's not. It's source available. Seems from their posts, they mainly want to exclude commercial use, but I'm not sure about their legalese, and the actual license text restricts how people can share and modify it. But the licensing is there by now.
Ephera@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
Well, any software needs to include a license of some form, if you want it to be usable by others. But if it’s not an open-source or libre license, then it’s a proprietary license. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. At that point, it depends on what’s actually written into the license. But it’s also not a good thing, as you miss out on various open-source benefits due to there being no proven legal compatibility with open-source licenses. Well, and if I remember correctly, FUTO’s license actively prohibits reuse of the code anyways.