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.
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.
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.
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…
The main right missing is for others to use the code for any commercial reasons, while checking I re-read the license again and realized I made some mistakes, so I fixed those in my comment.
I guess it is open source depending on definitions of it, and I was just being nitpicky, but not FOSS since it does restrict the purposes that the code can be used for, giving futo more rights than forks would have as well as the control to cut others off from the code at any time
We may suspend, terminate or vary the terms of this license and any access to the code at any time, without notice, for any reason or no reason, in respect of any licensee, group of licensees or all licensees including as may be applicable any sub-licensees.
Louis Rossman said in his video that this was so people didn’t repackage the application with ads and malware. He said it’s fair game to recompile and altar it in any other capacity though.
I’ve never heard of him before Grayjay suddenly started trending on here, so I’ll only trust them after this has existed for a little while due to them being able to change the license terms so freely (not that they will or not)
Without a fully open license I just don’t trust someone who comes in suddenly doing it differently than everyone else. Assuming they end up being trustworthy this will be a great thing though.
Louis Rossman is the poster child for the right to repair movement. He’s been doing this for well over a decade at this point. It’s okay that you don’t know him, but just trust us when we say that he’s pretty trustworthy. Maybe I don’t know, do some research into him.
I’ll still wait to see, repairing devices and advocating for the right to repair is not the same thing as developing a video app and open source licensing
I wouldn’t assume by default that a person who knows how to build and repair a rocket also knows how to reach the moon in one.
I don’t expect others to be skeptical just because I think it is, but I just prefer to wait and see on these things regardless of who’s in charge of it, I’ve been burned by things that were supposed to be trustworthy before.
Afterall a healthy mentality. Even if I think Rossmann does some great things - he is still a rando on the internet.
Me as a dev understands the desire to protect your work against malicious actors. On the other hand some of the best work is GPL licensed. IMO their license provides an ok middle ground between protection and non-commercial redistribution.
Downloaded it and tried it. It’s awesome. It blows invidious and newpipe out of the water. Plus it includes my nebula subscriptions in with my YouTube subscriptions.
Nebula is beta, hopefully it gets support for sending back watch stats and saving watch progress 🙏
I see they have something similar for YouTube already, where you can enable/disable anonymity (using your google account for requests VS anonymous requests), and enable/disable saving watch history to your linked Google account
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.
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.
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.
Add comment