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.
I suppose I was today years old when I learned that the general consensus among software people is that proprietary software means software with any restrictions, not just software which is entirely black-boxed.
I was unaware of any ongoing conflict about FUTO and thought that it was a widely supported alternative
It’s a common mistake. Many people don’t understand the difference between open source software and source available. I didn’t until i joined lemmy. But the open source software is defined by giving certain rights to the developers and/or end-users. When someone publishes the code but doesn’t fulfill the open source criteria then it is just more generically called “source available”. Many companies are interested in open-washing their license as being open source since it takes advantage of people not knowing the difference but having heard good things about open source software.
Consider a case where you have an actual open source project and there is some controversy like making the code closed source and selling off to some startup. You could then take that code and make your own fork of the project. Some open source licenses might restrict you to using the same license the project initially used but you’ll still be able to salvage the product from being monetized to hell or whatever shit they were trying to do. If the code was source available then there would’ve been extra restrictions in place and those might have prevented you from using the code at all.
Or even worse - i release code that detects with 100% accuracy the exact time of death someone will have, but when i release the code i don’t attach any license to it. This means I’m actually reserving all rights for myself even if i did put the code out there for people to see. This is actually even worse than “source available” because people can’t legally do anything with it except look at it.
Futo is not open source but it is a fine product.
Which is what I said in that thread and my comment was also removed.
This is a bad faith behavior IMHO
We really should stop commenting on ml ran subs IMHO
People say fake shit all the time without having their comment censored.
There is nothing wrong with futo being thrown in along with Foss keyboards. It should be disclosed that it is not fpsss and normies can make their own decisions.