this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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look, I understand you're all followers this "influencer" or whatever. But this is not a novelty feature. Newpipe has been allowing access to YouTube videos in a similar matter for a long, long time. And their app is truly free software, anyone's able to view, edit and distribute the code.
So if this dev is telling everyone that the reason for them using a not open/libre license is to impede people putting trackers on top, that's absurd.
Specially taking into account that real a malicious actor won't give a fuck about the license, take the code and put ads or whatever anyway.
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.
They can sue his ass. New Pipe cant
good luck suing someone in a country like Russia, China or any other where these things are super hard to enforce. At most, they can request Google to remove them from the PlayStore which they will be already doing because this is an app for YouTube without ads, which I'm pretty sure breaks Google's terms of service.
there's not a real advantage on restricting forks, other than the original dev are trying to promote a paid tier so they can make a profit or something.
Those countries have their own domestic solutions already, rutube and bilibili. Why would they care about an app that only caters to western media products and monetary contribution sites?
This is not an app for YouTube without ads though, and it is published on the play store already...
Well, no point having a discussion here if you didn't even spend 2 mins to read the manifesto of the company that owns the app.
No idea about bilibili, but rutube is pretty much dead and a complete laughingstock. Everyone there uses Youtube.
This argument is absurd. Why would they care? They do not care about western media, but malicious developers living in such countries will try to make some money by inserting ads and distributing the app, for example. Or just putting malware.
I'm aware, I used YouTube because in the video they used Newpipe as a direct comparison.
I read the whole web page, and all I can see is an app that is purposefully restricting forks, so they want to be the only ones distributing it. That alone makes me suspicious that there must be some reason like paywalling it in the future or adding some way of making them money. Of course they are not doing it at launch, but it's something to be cautious about specially when looking at the license.
Sure someone could make a malicious version of this app and share it, but the reason why they have this license is so that they can have the legal power to be able to get those versions shut down. They don't want to have the problem that they mentioned newpipe has, where malicious versions can being distributed on popular channels such as the official app store.
Having watched the video and skimmed the licence, it seems like you can view, edit and distribute the code. The stipulation they added is that you can't add anything malicious or monetize it. I don't see anything that would prevent the equivalent of the newpipe version with sponsorblock
It seems alright to me, but I guess there will always be people who aren't happy unless they give up every ounce of control over their own creation. Maybe it's because of the open source title, because yeah it might not live up to some of the strictest definitions out there.
strictest definitions? it does not meet either the free software definition originally given by the free software movement, nor the original definition of open source by Eric S Raymond, not the open source definition given by the Open Source Initiative, nor the definition given by Wikipedia.
So this license does not meet any definition at all.
I won't elaborate on the other points because it's clear we're in disagreement here. I'm just saying that the license is NOT open source.