I don’t mean the recent selling API rights at absurd costs but when they went from open sourcish to closed.

  • Bobby Turkalino@lemmy.yachtsEnglish
    24·
    1 year ago

    The original creators can sure try, but since Lemmy is ACTUALLY open source, the community can just fork the source, call it “the-good-lemmy” or whatever, and devote our time & resources to it instead of using the bullshit version

  • amio@kbin.social
    12·
    1 year ago

    No. The API debacle was fundamentally about money, after all. In the very unlikely event someone does something similarly one-sided and stupid with a fediverse offering, people will simply fork it or move to different ActivityPub compliant software. Neither is possible on Reddit, a proprietary, for-profit website.

  • nromdotcom@beehaw.orgEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    I guess I don’t see what the incentive would be for this, or even what it realistically means in this case.

    Do you mean like relicensing the backend and frontend with a closed source license? I don’t see what the incentive would be for that unless they wanted lemmyml to be the only instance in existence (which runs counter to it’s raison d’etre) and to make secret/proprietary/commercial extensions to it that are difficult to develop in the open.

    Or I guess unless they wanted to start charging instance admins for the honor and pleasure of running their software, which at least right now would be the quickest way to ensure nobody runs their software.

      • Otter@lemmy.caEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        It’s always possible, but it would make no sense for it to do so. Lemmy runs entirely off donations, and it’s a free and open source product first (looking at how the code is being written, how the organization is structured, and the fact that the open source community is building it as opposed to employees at a company etc.).

        With Lemmy, there are many different groups (and individuals) running their own instances. Lemmy is the program that is running on the server, and when there’s an update with new features, everyone downloads the new version. If Lemmy were to go closed source, I’m sure that the open source community would just make a fork and continue working there, and most (if not all) of those instances would just download that version instead.

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      It’s not truly decentralized, it’s federated. So if lemmy devs change things, each instance can choose whether to pull those in or continue with its current version, potentially defederating as necessary.

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          I mean instances are not decentralized, they are federated. When I say “decentralized,” I mean how BitTorrent is decentralized, as in there’s no central server where everything happens. Lemmy is federated, which means there are multiple centralized instances that communicate with each other.

  • wiki_me@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    This was asked before, but it is under the AGPL (which means that if you modify the code you must make the modifications public), to make it a closed source project you would have to get the agreement of every contributor or rewrite it’s code which is very hard to do (and i don’t think i ever heard something like this happened). The federated aspect is another line of defense.