this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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Privacy
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Exactly. Beware of the inevitable enshittification down the line. Once they have the market share, they have no reason not to close their source
Futo (the organisation developing this app) appears to be a tech billionaire (Eron Wolf) firing his money at the tech industry until it stops being so shit.
This is from the about page on their website:
(From: https://futo.org/what-is-futo/)
What they say and what they will do could of course differ but they do go to great pains to paint themselves as fundamentally opposed to be sort of action you are worried about.
Words are cheap. Google used to write "don't be evil". If they are a billionaire, they could easily afford to make this FOSS.
I trust Louis Rossman not to do that. He explained the only reason for the current license is to prevent people forking the app and putting it on the Play store with ads
I trust no one. Just put the code in a permissive license so when you eventually cease developing the app or when you turn into adding anti-features there are community forks.
He explained his reasoning in the video. He said a malicious copy of newpipe got forked and uploaded to the play store and he would like to prevent that from happening.
that's no excuse at all. This way they are restricting everyone's freedom.
Free software, or if you prefer, open source, is based on the principle that everyone can use the code for any purpose (some licenses have copyleft but that just requires you to share your modifications to the code).
A malicious actor will simply grab this app code anyway, don't giving a crap about the license and put ads on top. If they are a malicious actor after all, I highly doubt the license will stop them.
What the license is stopping are legitimate community forks. There's a fork of Newpipe that adds Sponsorblock support, for example, which comes super handy. If community forks weren't allowed, it wouldn't be possible at all.
Having a license allows them to go after the malicious actor with legal backing.
They should allow that. With gpl, the name is protected and that's all that matters.