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this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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The futo temporary license is not very open at all. Yes you can view the source code, but the license can be revoked at any time. So this is basically source available for auditing, but no community should use this code / project to build any modifications, or forks, or anything contributing to the ecosystem.
It's great that futo is innovating, but I want to make it clear its not open source by the standard meaning.
Maybe a better term for this type of "source viewable" closed project would be "source verifiable"
(Duplicating my comment from another thread on this subject)
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!
(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)