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this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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Yeah, but the FUTO group did that to avoid possible forks being made with ads, trackers and malware, like what happened to Newpipe.
They do accept contributions in the form of plugins, which I think is a very clever way of doing it, while keeping the project closed to bad actors.
I’ve personally already downloaded it. Pretty excited to see this project succeed!
Seems weird to be against the one major selling point of free and open source software (anyone can fork it and scratch their own itch), but then claim to be open source.
Anyway, to each their own, I'm glad you like it!
Seems pretty natural for me considering one of the points of open source software is to try and get away from trackers malware and bloated ad experiences so you can see directly what you are running, making sure your product is not able to be abused in that way promotes more open source initiatives while allowing the owners to make sure any changes jive with the original intent of their open source software. You are free to modify all you like so long as you don't distribute a forked version with ads, malware or trackers. They cover this very clearly.
I think the main point is, this makes it unavailable in F-Droid and everyone else unable to build upon, use or adapt it for their own use-cases except for the specific ones outlined by FUTO. It's source-available software. Not free software. And it has other downsides, too. Once YouTube starts cracking down on third-party apps and the companies behind it, it's gone for good. yt-dl has demonstrated free software offers more resilience in those cases.
And I'd argue it's ineffective. Having a license forbid malicious use will only stop the honest people from using it. The bad players will probably not care. But that's debatable.
(No hate on the FUTO team. It's their hard work and livelihood and if that's the licence they want, that's fine. This is just my personal opinion.)
If they're just trying to avoid a NewPipe situation, the licence is more heavy-handed than it has to be. NewPipe is GPLv3, which has provisions in it for preventing forks from using certain names or logos or identifying marks. The NewPipe team chose not to (or neglected to) use those specific provisions in the GPL. But it's perfectly within their right to add to the licence information "You are not allowed to use the words 'new' or 'pipe' or use the letter P stylized as a triangle in a logo. The GPL makes a provision for these sorts of restrictions to automatically void the licence even for the case where none of those things are legally trademarked. (I'm not a lawyer and it's probably an open question as to how a court would enforce that clause, but my suspicion is it's probably enough to get Google to suspend violators from the Play Store at the very least. Probably you'd want to go to the trouble of trademarking them to be safe)