https://lemmy.ml/post/35472063

The original post is about a supposedly privacy focused keyboard that sends your voice and messages to OpenAI for speech to text. I posted saying I use the FUTO Keyboard as it’s open source and does voice to text on-device. There unsued a discussion about if the FUTO Keyboard is open source, as the license prohibits commercial use. After people sharing thoughts on this for a day, the mods removed the thread for being offtopic and promoting proprietary software. Even if you think that the license prohibiting commercial use makes it not open source, it certainly doesn’t make it proprietary.

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlEnglish
    151·
    3 days ago

    Source available is indeed the correct term for this type of license, but FUTO doesn’t like it because that category also includes other licenses which impose different restrictions than they do. So, they now are calling theirs “source first” instead. 🤷

    At least they stopped calling it open source!

    • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
      51·
      3 days ago

      I don’t understand the nuance in licensing but how is this not open source?

      "Allow users to see the source code of all of our software.

      Ensure that you can modify the source code for your own use, and redistribute it."

      • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlEnglish
        102·
        3 days ago

        Their actual license includes these points which are not mentioned in the blog post you’re quoting from:

        You may use or modify the software only for non-commercial purposes such as personal use for research, experiment, and testing for the benefit of public knowledge, personal study, private entertainment, hobby projects, amateur pursuits, or religious observance, all without any anticipated commercial application.

        and

        you may not remove or obscure any functionality in the software related to payment to the Licensor

        Among other things, these restrictions effectively mean that nobody has the right to fork the software, so anyone contributing to it is doing volunteer work exclusively for FUTO. When FUTO goes out of business the software can/will no longer be maintained (unless they decide to re-license it under a FLOSS license before they dissolve their legal entity).

        If the right to fork seems unimportant, I recommend reading this informative text about why it is one of the essential freedoms which (real) FLOSS licenses are designed to protect.

        • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
          34·
          3 days ago

          If you could fork and remove a license, then GPL would be meaningless. You can fork but companies can’t sell their code.

          They don’t want other companies to profit off the code. Maybe there scamming in there but on the surface it’s a worthy goal.

          • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlEnglish
            6·
            3 days ago

            did you read the text about “Forking and Free Software” on the page I linked in my comment you’re replying to?

        • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
          35·
          3 days ago

          "Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. "

          Which is what that software does. Which is why I’m confused.

          Are they scammers that claim to publish their code but don’t?

          • алсааас [she/they]@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            121·
            3 days ago

            The four essential freedoms

            A program is free software if the program’s users have the four essential freedoms: [1]

            • The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
            • The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
            • The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).
            • The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
            • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
              35·
              3 days ago

              They said you can. The restriction is that you can’t make money off it. Which doesn’t seem against the spirit of open source. Nothing in open source requires that you give your code to corporations for free.

                • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
                  4·
                  3 days ago

                  Come on, there’s no need to be hostile. Look at my history. I’ve never heard of them before. Nor am I an expert on the various licenses.

                  Agpl is stronger about forcing release of forked source code but doesn’t say anything about commercial use. What is an existing GPL variant that prevents commercial use?

                  • алсааас [she/they]@lemmy.dbzer0.com
                    5·
                    3 days ago

                    Hey, sorry for coming off harsh. It’s just that I’ve had enough with people claiming Futo is somehow the good guy here. Preventing commercial use is against everything FLOSS and basically makes forks impossible and any contribution to the project meaningless…

                    Also “commercial use” is incredibly broad, in Germany e.g. all commercial websites must have an imprint and IIRC some court ruled that even private websites must have one as well, so there is that. Futos’ licensing is really a scummy move akin to MongoDBs SSPL.

                    The idea behind the GPL is that any change you make has to be available as source code to the users in addition to the four essential freedoms. The GPLv3 patched some exploits (LOL) regarding proprietary devices (ab)using free/libre software and the AGPL patches the “providing a service over a website” loophole which is not covered by the vanilla GPL.

                    This page by Codeberg has a nice decision tree regarding choosing an actually free/libre license and is also a good read in general
                    https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/licensing/