Quick shout-out to Grayjay: An app to watch videos on any platform - reducing the power of individual services. The Software is open-source and can be found here: gitlab.futo.org/videostreaming/grayjay
I will test this out for myself and hope someone here finds this useful.
It isn’t free however they are very clear that they make no effort to make you pay for it. IE the app works whether you pay or not and they aren’t planning to change that. It’s not free in the same way WinRAR isn’t free. Here’s the announcement video from Louis Rossman where he talks about that. youtu.be/5DePDzfyWkw?si=KuNumtHUrtW_kHSC
hey @ToxicWaste can you please edit your post to remove the inaccurate statement “The Software is open-source”? you could say it is “source-visible software” or some other 🤡 term, but “open source” has a definition and this software’s license aint it.
I have found three comments from you, where you insert yourself as an expert on what Open Source is/not is. Although you do link to some sources, you do so without arguing your point. IMO this is not a constructive way of communication. Since I believe your perspective is purist but overall not too helpful, I will go through the trouble an actually argue the point:
Your problem is following sentence published by the OSI: “The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources.” Which FUTO does - they won’t allow you to put ads on top of their software and distribute it. But I hope that you would agree with me that GNU GPL is an Open Source License. However, they do have a copyleft which practically makes selling software impossible. If you use a library which uses the GPL, you have to make your sources available - which makes selling a compiled version a difficult task…
If we look at Wikipedia, we see following sentence: “Generally, open source refers to a computer program in which the source code is available to the general public for use or modification from its original design.”, Grayjay fulfils this. Wikipedia continues: “{…}. Depending on the license terms, others may then download, modify, and publish their version {…}”, you are allowed to download and modify Grayjay. They do not allow you to commercially distribute your modifications, which is a license term.
Lets look at a big OSS company. Red Hat writes: “An open source development model is the process used by an open source community project to develop open source software. The software is then released under an open source license, so anyone can view or modify the source code.” These criteria are fulfilled by the FUTO TEMPORARY LICENSE (Last updated 7 June 2023). Red Hat does not mention the right to redistribute anywhere I could find it.
To those who actually read up to this point: I hope you find this helpful to form your own opinion based on your own research.
since you’ve declined to remove the inaccurate statement “The Software is open-source” from your post here in !privacy I am removing the post. (since I am an admin rather than a mod of the community, the moderation action will only federate to instances running the latest version of lemmy, which your instance isn’t, but fyi it should be removed from lemmy.ml and any other instances running updated software.)
fwiw i think this is the first time i’ve used my admin privileges to remove something in a discussion i participated in myself, which tbh feels a little weird, but since this is a clear case of someone declining to remove a post making an objectively false claim, i’m going to.
Not sure what part of a free YT+ frontend that doesn’t require permissions or an account you don’t trust, but the reason is they don’t want people to fork it freely and spread a version with malware, like happened to NewPipe.
What exactly do you mean by “trust”, here? Yes, it’s not fully FOSS, and I do understand why you wouldn’t like or use it because of that, but you can still verify the code, compile it yourself and build and run it with your own modifications, so how would being fully FOSS make you trust it more?
FOSS acts as a layer that protects users from the devolopers. Even if its from a respected privacy youtuber I will not look away because he is conciously making a decicion not to use an open source liscence. They could make it closed source the moment they gwt some marketshare
Software simply being FOSS does not equal trust. It never has, and never should.
A free program certainly doesn’t make it trustworthy.
edit: as pointed out, free stands for liberty to do as you please, not the financial definition. With that in mind, I definitely wouldn’t call Grayjoy FOSS due to the license. I like my made up classification, but maybe this would work better; ROSS, “restricted open source software.”
An open source program doesn’t make it trustworthy. Unless you vet the program yourself you can never be 100% trusting.
For most of us, we’re trusting the smaller community of people who actually go through the code for us. We don’t trust individual pieces of FOSS, we trust the FOSS community and recognize that a developer is less likely to place malicious software in the code. However, it’s also much easier for a malicious 3rd party to fork the program and infect the code.
I’m confident that anything FUTO puts out is going to be heavily looked over by all the Louis haters and fanboys - if they’re up to something shady, we’ll hear about it.
This particular software is what I’d call Open Source Donation Ware (OSDW)
“please pay us but we aren’t checking if you do. Here’s the code, if you want you could copy it and remove the payment all together. However, we retain the legal right to destroy any fork that adds spy/malware.”
As a model, I can respect it. It’s a good medium between releasing the program to the wild and being closed source. It’s also a good model for making money for their work, pretty much like winrar’s approach (rip now that windows is finally getting native .rar support). Yes, some programs are more subtle with a little coffee cup button, but as long as it doesn’t constantly nag you, I’m okay with a more prominent ‘donation’ button.
I would like to point out that free in FOSS doesn’t mean free as in gratis. It means free as in libre, means independent. Open source independent software. And I trust no software that isn’t truly FOSS as a personal principle. I don’t care if it’s FUTO, Louis or even goddamn Facebook. Not open? No go. I will stick to Foss alternatives
I find it strange that they immediately called it a “better ReVanced”, when apart from the feed thing it doesn’t have nearly as many features as ReVanced.
Has anyone come up with an actual reason to switch? Because I have a feeling ReVanced is still better?
All you can hope is that some day they are forced to support 3rd party apps because of some anti monopoly lawsuit telling them they have too.
I’m not sure if you are aware already but the reason Epic are announcing a million changes to their business is that the previous business plan was based around them successfully throwing a fortune at suing Apple to force them to support 3rd party apps and they tried and failed.
I think if it were ever going to happen that way, Epic would have succeeded.
That’s not to say it won’t still happen one day through political means. Seems plausible the EU might force it at some stage.
AFAICT, the only restrictions are you cannot make money off it, and you can’t pretend to be the official app. Very similar to the Mozilla license, although Mozilla’s has some extra bits to be compliant with releasing on the App Store, which has its own licensing requirements that is not met by any version of the GPL
Ohh I see, sounds like more of a principled reason then if i’m understanding you correctly
Edit: while Louis is accepting feedback on the license specifically, I doubt the project will move to something relicensable, since Louis specifically picked this license to prevent what is happening to NewPipe and the spread of malware using his name to gain trust. He’s also been burned a lot during the R2R stuff with unforseen loopholes abused by rival lobbyists, so the FUTO license is probably looking at things from a protectionist perspective, not as an individual from the FOSS community.
I’ve only heard of one OSS project relicensing in recent times, and they had to reach out to each individual contributor for written permission, hopefully this rings a bell for someone here because I can’t remember the project name…
I watched a bunch of that too but what was a little concerning to me was holding up Destiny as an example of a good use case for the service. There’s a reason Destiny keeps getting banned from every platform he touches. Putting him up front and center makes me wonder if they have a plan to deal with problematic people (like Destiny). Are they just going to the up hosting white supremacists and Neonazis? That’s not really a (meta)platform i want to support.
Yattee, it’s an invidious/piped frontend, so you’ll need to find an instance for one, but it’s on the app store or can be sideloaded.
There’s that and uYou+/uYou+ extra which needs to be sideloaded via AltStore or other methods, but doesn’t need a piped or invidious instance and accesses YouTube directly
There are definitely foss apps on iOS and you can sideload without jailbreaking to access more foss apps. Any amount of foss is good regardless of what OS is used.
If there was a Linux approach to smartphones, I’d be interested. Instead, it’s a choice between two large corporations. And one of them receives the majority of its income from advertising. So that’s why I chose what I perceived to be the lesser of the two evils.
The lesser of two evils is Android as it’s like they put closed-source software on top of open source software (see AOSP) whereas on iPhone it’s all closed.
Louis says somewhere in a comment on the presentation video that they won’t have (at least for the time being) an iOS app because Apple wouldn’t allow it in the Store, so there’s that.
App looks legitimately amazing. Seems a bit buggy in alpha but I’m sure it’ll be ironed out. I just hope they look into supporting Piped instead of directly connecting to YouTube, as well as SponsorBlock. Once they get those 2 things and iron out some of the bugs, I’ll primarily use it for sure. Its a great concept.
The app supports plugins for other platforms with development docs coming that I don’t think are out yet. So if they don’t add it someone else certainly can
Wouldn’t interacting through Piped just introduce an additional communication layer, which makes interacting with YT slower? I see your argument with Piped, but what would be the pros of using Piped which outweighs the additional communication costs?
Pro would just be not directly connecting through Google/YouTube servers, and instead using a proxy. Its a nice privacy benefit. I agree it could make things slower, so I don’t think it should completely replace direct connection with YouTube, but I just think the option would be nice to have.
Isn’t that kind of the nature of open source though? Waiting until something is “finished” before making it open source would cut off a lot of innovation and contribution possibilities. Some software would never be seen because the original author didn’t get to “finish” it and nobody else could pick it up.
Unfinished open source software releases are a good thing.
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