Is it just me or is passing off things that aren’t FOSS as FOSS a much bigger thing lately than it was previously.
Don’t get me wrong. I remember Microsoft’s “shared source” thing from back in the day. So I know it’s not a new thing per se. But it still seems like it’s suddenly a bigger problem than it was previously.
LLaMa, the large language model, is billed by Meta as “Open Source”, but isn’t.
I just learned today about “Grayjay,” a video streaming service client app created by Louis Rossmann. Various aticles out there are billing it as “Open Source” or “FOSS”. It’s not. Grayjay’s license doesn’t allow commercial redistribution or derivative works. Its source code is available to the general public, but that’s far from sufficient to qualify as “Open Source.” (That article even claims “GrayJay is an open-source app, which means that users are free to alter it to meet their specific needs,” but Grayjay’s license grants no license to create modified versions at all.) FUTO, the parent project of Grayjay pledges on its site that “All FUTO-funded projects are expected to be open-source or develop a plan to eventually become so.” I hope that means that they’ll be making Grayjay properly Open Source at some point. (Maybe once it’s sufficiently mature/tested?) But I worry that they’re just conflating “source available” and “Open Source.”
I’ve also seen some sentiment around that “whatever, doesn’t matter if it doesn’t match the OSI’s definition of Open Source. Source available is just as good and OSI doesn’t get a monopoly on the term ‘Open Source’ anyway and you’re being pedantic for refusing to use the term ‘Open Source’ for this program that won’t let you use it commercially or make modifications.”
It just makes me nervous. I don’t want to see these terms muddied. If that ultimately happens and these terms end up not really being meaningful/helpful, maybe the next best thing is to only speak in terms of concrete license names. We all know the GPL, MIT, BSD, Apache, Mozilla, etc kind of licenses are unambiguously FOSS licenses in the strictest sense of the term. If a piece of software is under something that doesn’t have a specific name, then the best we’d be able to do is just read it and see if it matches the OSI definition or Free Software definition.
Until then, I guess I’ll keep doing my best to tell folks when something’s called FOSS that isn’t FOSS. I’m not sure what else to do about this issue, really.
At least in the U.S. any right granted exclusively to the copyright holder and not mentioned in the license is reserved by the copyright holder. So if the license doesn’t allow something that absent a license would constitute copyright infringement, then… well… it’s not allowed.
In the licence, they say “subject to the terms of this license, we grant you a non-transferable, non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to access and use the code solely for the purposes of review, compilation and non-commercial distribution.” “Review” is defined elsewhere in the license and seems pretty explicitly and purposefully not to include making altered versions of the work.
A modified version of it would be a “derivative work” under copyright law, which would constitute copyright infringement (even if not distributed, according to the research I’ve done) if the license didn’t allow it. So as far as I can tell from the license, even cloning the source of Grayjay and changing the background color would constitute copyright infringement.
And, of course, just above, it also says “non-commercial distribution.” So selling a copy of the source or compiled code would infringe.
(Also, the section where the license says “we may change the rules at any time” basically makes the license completely useless.)
All that to say if you’re looking for anything to back up claims of restrictions, it’s all there in the license.
Honestly, I haven’t watched Louis Rossmann’s video about Grayjay but I wouldn’t be satisfied to just trust what he says when the license says something else. (Still, I do intend to watch it when I get a sec if I can. Or did YouTube take it down and make it hard to find? Who knows.)
Open Source (or FOSS or Free Software or whatever) doesn’t mean there’s no gatekeeper. The vast majority of Open Source projects allow contributions only after an approval process.
I get that. I’d still rather see it properly FOSS, though.
I used to pay attention to things in the Minetest development community. There were some cases where random folks made Android ports (before Minetest officially supported Android) and sold them on the Play Store.
(Which seems like a good argument for copyleft but that’s none of my business. Lol.)
I would imagine any outfit sleazy enough to distribute “malware” wouldn’t be deterred by a little copyright infringement. I wouldn’t think a source-available project could prevent that with license terms to any extent that a FOSS project couldn’t.
(Or do you mean something more like I’d call “antifeatures” – not illegal, but privacy invading or DRM’d whatever?)
I’m not sure why you think a transition to FOSS would require any change in how it’s developed.
I’m less concerned about whether people can actually materially make it do things the authors didn’t anticipate now than I am whether I can be certain that if/when it gets enshittified or abandoned or whatever someone can fork it and the world goes on our merry way as if nothing was amiss. Like has been done with OpenOffice/Libreoffice, MPlayer/MPlayer2/MPV, and others. As the license is now, we 100% cannot without rewriting at least the core from scratch in a cleanroom kind of fashion.
Again, why after it transitioned to FOSS would it suddenly have to be maintained by a “community” of “unpaid volunteer contributors” any more so than it is now?