this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2023
37 points (84.9% liked)
Open Source
31118 readers
1101 users here now
All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!
Useful Links
- Open Source Initiative
- Free Software Foundation
- Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Software Freedom Conservancy
- It's FOSS
- Android FOSS Apps Megathread
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to the open source ideology
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Rly? Last time I checked most of their projects had a temporary license and Louis said they needed to figure out how to prevent something like with NewPipe from happening. Did they find a final license in the meantime?
Do they read the Github? All I see is people not understanding the source is somewhere else and saying xy isn't open source. And I don't see anyone from FUTO intervening or posting. It's mainly the community amongst themselves in the issues... Or did I miss something?
It's worth noting, of course, that those illicit forks of NewPipe also violate their license. If dishonest proprietary software developers don't care about NewPipe's license why would they care about FUTO's? If they really want to stop forks they can simply make their product source-unavailable, but then they don't get to claim to be "open source" or "open source adjacent."
The problem is not so much that the are forks (remember, in the free software world, forks are explicitly allowed) but that these forks use the branding of the original project and thus damage the original project's reputation. There is a tool for dealing with counterfeits - trademark - and it is a tool used by reputable free software organizations such as Mozilla and Debian. Now imagine if those free software projects adopted FUTO's hostility to forks - it would be a net loss to the free software community. Don't let organizations like FUTO sell you the idea that you don't need the freedom to fork.
Of course, even proprietary products can be counterfeited, and trademark helps stop those too.