Today FUTO released an application called Grayjay for Android-based mobile phones. Louis Rossmann introduced the application in a video (YouTube link). Grayjay as an application is very promising, but there is one point I take issue with: Grayjay is not an Open Source application. In the video Louis explains his reason behind the custom license, and while I do agree with his reason, I strong disagree with his method. In this post I will explain what Open Source means, how Grayjay does not meet the criteria, why this is an issue, and how it can be solved.
Open Source != “Source available”. The whole point is that distinction is important, and there are plenty of companies now (MongoDB, Elastic and more recently Hashicorp) that are trying to claim to be “Open Source”, but in fact use licenses that prevent redistribution and impose conditions to use, which means that they are definitely not open.
There you go. You can find projects that I’ve done for myself, projects that I’ve done while working for companies with real open source products, small libraries that were not core to the company and I convinced them to open source…
You know what they all have in common? All these licenses (MIT, GPL, AGPL) adopting allow code re-use, modification and redistribution.
First: please don’t use the Royal We. It’s a cheap rhetoric trick.
Second: you know what really hurts me. Companies that use “Open source” as a marketing point and to build community but remove freedoms when it’s no longer in their interests.
But I never used a royal “We”, in fact “we” was never used in my text at all. I used us, to refer to all the other comments that you can note does not agree with your assessment of open source.
Instead of you arguing my “cheap rhetorical skills”, how about you actually answer more than, estimated, a fifth of my statements? How about you stop with your own victimization of " what really hurts me". Because that, in essence, is actually cheap rhetorics.
I fully agree that when companies do this, that it is disgusting. But you have to take a step back and look at the actual effect. This is not by any means new, it happened likely before I was even conceived.
What would you say your point is. To shame grayjoy or make a point that this is a threat to open source? Both? Neither?