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.ml
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    7 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
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      7 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.ml
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        7 days ago

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