What is Grayjay?
Grayjay is a cutting-edge app that serves as a video player and source aggregator. It allows you to stream and organize videos from various sources, providing a unified platform for your entertainment needs.
It’s mostly used as a YouTube frontend^. However, it is now launching as a desktop app for Linux, Mac and Windows.
As a member of the FOSS community, and someone who has written an absolute truckload of FOSS software, I stand by what I said.
Open Source was coined before OSI was formed. OSI, and the previous launch of GNU by Stallman, was to combat the new (at the time) practice of only releasing machine code and the commercial vehicles that came along with it.
The original spirit of sharing source code for projects in academia, before software required so much more effort, still exists in licenses like SSPLv1, etc, that are not adopted by OSI.
I, personally, think this is a bad decision.
I, personally, feel that an organization that wishes to make their products source-available, especially those that allow noncommercial modification, should be recognized for that, not punished or gate kept.
I, personally, would love to see OSI adopt an open attitude towards those types of organizations, and create another official tier in the lexicon with it’s own set of standard licenses that fit under it.
I understand and accept that other’s don’t feel that way, but that does not make their opinion about what should count as “open” any better than my own, just more widely accepted at the time.
Nobody has any objection to companies making their source code available, and they are free to call their software “source-available”, “source-first”, or some other term because their source code is available. But if they restrict what users can do with the software, then it isn’t open source. MongoDB, Redis, and even FUTO now all recognize this distinction.
The FOSS community, at large, doesn’t tolerate the watering down of recognized terms such as “open source” by bad actors who want to co-opt the term for marketing while denying users the right to use open source software for any purpose. That is known as openwashing. This kind of misappropriation is not welcome in any kind of movement, not just the FOSS movement.
The free software and open source software movements both support rights for users, which include the right to use free software and open source software for all commercial purposes without restriction. These movements support the release of source code as one requirement for ensuring these user rights, but source availability is not the only requirement for a piece of software to be open source.
There’s no problem with creating another classification of restricted source-available licenses as long as it isn’t called open source, a term rooted in the open source software movement’s adoption of the Open Source Definition for over 20 years.
As for myself, I personally prefer source-available software over software with no source available, though I also prefer FOSS over restrictively licensed source-available software.
I 100% agree with all of this. Grayjay should not be considered FOSS or “Open Source”. But I, like Stallman of before, don’t like the choice of Open Source as representative of Free and Open Source. I am in the minority and will of course live with that.
I just wish that since OSI has a hold of the terms, and those who aren’t as knowledgeable as yourself will default to “not OSI = bad” that they would open the doors to another tier. The world is very different now than it was in the 80s.
A good example is Codeberg, an Org I’m a huge fan of, only list OSI licenses in their drop down, and actively focus on adoption of OSI licenses, when I would be happy to see SSPLv1 software there.
It’s the reason some of my professional (corporate) projects can’t leverage Codeberg and continue to use GitHub, while others I run for the same organization can be since they are MIT.