cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/15242858
Saw Louis Rossmans original video on the app and figured (and it may well have been) it would be buggy and awful at that point. Decided to gike it a try, the app has all the options I could want for watching youtube, it’s multiplatform to a much greater degree than Newpipe and it’s forks.
The reason I don’t ever expect to go back to Newpipe or Libretube is the plugins update through the app, meaning I can get bypasses to YouTubes bullshit as fast as they’re developed.
Newpipe is usually updated quickly, but in my experience forks like Tubular that include sponsorblocks often delay me from getting that update.
Overall, very good experience so far!
Yeah, I’m salty at them for diluting the term “Open Source”.
And, yes, I’m more aligned with the Free Software movement than the Open Source movement. But in practice, all Open Source software is also Free Software, as long as they’re not misusing the term “Open Source” like FUTO recently apologized for. (Though this page still says “All FUTO-funded projects are expected to be open-source or develop a plan to eventually become so.” which I think is just a holdover from before they promised to stop misusing the term “Open Source” that they haven’t caught and fixed yet.)
But still, their license is kindof shitty. And maybe it’s just a narcissism of small diffrences thing, but it feels more nefarious in some ways than just a straight-forwardly proprietary license would be.
Anyway, no chance I’ll ever use GrayJay unless they some day decide to put it under a properly FOSS license. Even if only because there’s no way I’m going to go to the trouble of side-loading it or any Android app store other than the F-Droid I’ve got on my no-Google-apps LineageOS phone now.
And just in general purposefully and maliciously misusing terms like “Open Source” and “FOSS” is a pretty transparent capitalist scumbag move. And the “apology” for doing so is hardly an apology. They spend more of the apology casting shade at FOSS than apologizing. And then they have the gall to tell people that their shitty-ass GrayJay license is some panacea of consumer freedom or privacy? It’s worse than any Open Source license. If they really wanted to address the consumer privacy and freedom isuses in tech, they’d use AGPL. But no, their “improvement” on the BSD/MIT-style licenses is “don’t make any versions without ‘pay FUTO money’ buttons and don’t charge for it.” Good fucking job, FUTO, you fixed enshittification.
Bah. Yeah. I’m pissed at FUTO.
Thanks for your post. You’re getting lots of downvotes, but I upvoted. Folks ought to know how scummy FUTO is. I don’t really blame Rossman directly so much (though, honestly, I haven’t really followed him enough to know.) I suspect he may just be kinda clueless about FOSS and got swept up in FUTO’s rhetoric (even though there’s no substance behind their rhetoric) that they’re going to fix the industry or whatever. He just got pissed at Apple about their hostility to device repair (based), but then got hoodwinked by scummy capitalist bullshit.
I don’t have any issue with Capitalism. Companies, people and ideas should complete to make them all better. However, the FUTO license is anti capitalistic as it grants GreyJay a monopoly over the software. You can not fork it and retain ownership of the code. The code is owned by them and you can’t start a completing organization from a fork. If FUTO were to make GrayJay problematic by doing something such as adding invasive telemetry and ads then you couldn’t hard fork the project.
Damn. Am I about to defend FUTO/GrayJay?
The license is a lot better than it was previously. (And by that I mean it’s less worse than a basic MIT-style FOSS license, not that it’s “good”.) Now it does allow derivative works (just not derivative works that remove the “pay FUTO” button, and it doesn’t allow selleing GrayJay or derivative works, and it requires a “prominent” notice if you’ve made changes.)
And the old version had a bit about how FUTO could change the terms at any time for no reason, which basically made it entirely useless.
Technically, MIT-style licenses (let alone copy-left licenses) don’t either, I’m pretty sure. Though that’s more true in one sense of the GrayJay Core License than of Open Source licenses.
The fact that Greyjay prohibits anyone from making money off of means that a fork would be unable to happen.
Depends what you mean by “fork”, really. I could clone it down, change something trivial, and run that on my phone for my own personal use. And that would qualify as a “fork” and be allowed by the license.
But I can’t disagree that a well-maintained, long-lived, publicly-available fork (like, MPV was forked from MPlayer2 or Libreoffice from OpenOffice) seems very unlikely.
And I’d doubt a third party accepting donations even if they operated on a non-profit basis could be done given the wording.
What theoretically could be done is that a FOSS drop-in replacement for GrayJay (even one compatible with GrayJay plugins, many of which I’ve heard are actually FOSS.) Though anyone who undertook that would have to be careful to make it happen in a proper well-documented clean-room fashion.