Grayjay - Follow Creators, Not Platforms
grayjay.app
Grayjay is a unique media application that revolutionizes the relationship between content creators and their audience. Our app democratizes the content delivery process, shifting the focus from platforms to creators themselves.

Quick shout-out to Grayjay: An app to watch videos on any platform - reducing the power of individual services. The Software is open-source and can be found here: https://gitlab.futo.org/videostreaming/grayjay

I will test this out for myself and hope someone here finds this useful.

  • jet@hackertalks.comEnglish
    1201·
    1 year ago

    It’s viewable source, the license does not allow modification and distribution of the modifications. The license also reserves the right to be revoked at any time.

    It’s source available, but it is not what most people would consider open source in the common usage.

    • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      334·
      1 year ago

      Exactly. Beware of the inevitable enshittification down the line. Once they have the market share, they have no reason not to close their source

      • Piers@beehaw.orgEnglish
        41·
        1 year ago

        Futo (the organisation developing this app) appears to be a tech billionaire (Eron Wolf) firing his money at the tech industry until it stops being so shit.

        This is from the about page on their website:

        Our Three Pledges

        We will never sell out. All FUTO companies and FUTO-funded projects are expected to remain fiercely independent. They will never exacerbate the monopoly problem by selling out to a monopolist.

        We will never abuse our customers. All FUTO companies and FUTO-funded projects are expected to maintain an honest relationship with their customers. Revenue, if it exists, comes from customers paying directly for software and services. “The users are our product” revenue models are strictly prohibited.

        We will always be transparently devoted to making delightful software. All FUTO-funded projects are expected to be open-source or develop a plan to eventually become so. No effort will ever be taken to hide from the people what their computers are doing, to limit how they use them, or to modify their behavior through their software.

        (From: https://futo.org/what-is-futo/)

        What they say and what they will do could of course differ but they do go to great pains to paint themselves as fundamentally opposed to be sort of action you are worried about.

        • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          8·
          1 year ago

          Words are cheap. Google used to write “don’t be evil”. If they are a billionaire, they could easily afford to make this FOSS.

      • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
        1518·
        1 year ago

        I trust Louis Rossman not to do that. He explained the only reason for the current license is to prevent people forking the app and putting it on the Play store with ads

        • sir_reginald@lemmy.world
          252·
          1 year ago

          I trust no one. Just put the code in a permissive license so when you eventually cease developing the app or when you turn into adding anti-features there are community forks.

          • winkerjadams@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            712·
            1 year ago

            He explained his reasoning in the video. He said a malicious copy of newpipe got forked and uploaded to the play store and he would like to prevent that from happening.

            • sir_reginald@lemmy.world
              214·
              1 year ago

              that’s no excuse at all. This way they are restricting everyone’s freedom.

              Free software, or if you prefer, open source, is based on the principle that everyone can use the code for any purpose (some licenses have copyleft but that just requires you to share your modifications to the code).

              A malicious actor will simply grab this app code anyway, don’t giving a crap about the license and put ads on top. If they are a malicious actor after all, I highly doubt the license will stop them.

              What the license is stopping are legitimate community forks. There’s a fork of Newpipe that adds Sponsorblock support, for example, which comes super handy. If community forks weren’t allowed, it wouldn’t be possible at all.

              • dnu@lemmy.sdf.org
                98·
                1 year ago

                Having a license allows them to go after the malicious actor with legal backing.

        • Espi@lemmy.world
          91·
          1 year ago

          They should allow that. With gpl, the name is protected and that’s all that matters.

    • pontata@lemmy.world
      193·
      1 year ago

      He says in the video on yt that you can fork it and modify it however you want for personal use no problem. You just can’t make money distributing it I think.

      • Coasting0942@reddthat.com
        153·
        1 year ago

        So basically no chance of it coming to iOS. Given that even open source apps have options to purchase donations in the iOS app, cause developers can’t eat gratitude

        • pontata@lemmy.world
          11·
          1 year ago

          He also says somewhere in the comments that apple simply wouldn’t allow this app on the app store. But there’s also the option of sideloading, I think that’s free no?

          • roembol@lemmy.roembol.nl
            2·
            1 year ago

            Sideloading on iOS is free but a total PITA. There is little incentive to build an app for such a small userbase

        • silicon_reverie@lemmy.world
          2·
          1 year ago

          Sounds like a pretty good excuse to me. The code is viewable, which speaks to the privacy and accountability crowd. He allows personal modification, which appeases the tinkerers. The only group it doesn’t benefit are the ones trying to make money off of his work by degrading the user experience with ads. Are there better licenses he could have picked to accomplish his goal? Yes. Am I going to go on a Lemmy rant over a dev’s choice of license when he’s already done so much right? Hell no. It’s a win. Take the W and uninstall later if he changes his tune, just like with any other app whether open or closed.

          I do agree that true open source is better for everyone as it allows the community to truly own, improve, and evolve the app into the best version of itself. But this is the Privacy group, not the FOSS one. As far as my money is concerned, it ticks the boxes and earned my install. We’ll see where it goes from here.

    • Fallenwout@lemmy.world
      32·
      1 year ago

      He says in the video it is this way so they can legally pursue forks with malware and advertisements.

      • Mubelotix@jlai.lu
        3·
        1 year ago

        Youtube fails to fight its clones and you think they will succeed? It’s only disuasive

    • ToxicWaste@lemm.eeOP
      1427·
      1 year ago

      I see where you are coming from. Still i would argue that it is open source, since it is open for everyone to see.

      The explanation for this more restrictive license was that they want to prevent what happened to newpipe. Some ppl repackaged newpipe with additional crap, put ads on it etc. They want to have the legal geounds to combat these things.

      While I don’t think, they would go against me for forking it and tweaking things here and there - they have the legal ground to do so…

      • jet@hackertalks.comEnglish
        20·
        1 year ago

        Their license allows you to modify it, just not to distribute your modifications. For now.

        By the strictest technical definition of the term open source I agree with you.

        But in the cultural zeitgeist it is not open source and that it can’t be used by other projects, people can’t tinker with it and improve it downstream, if this company goes out of business the source code dies with it. At least legally.

        The Microsoft Windows source code is available, if you sign an NDA, and it’s been leaked a couple times online. So if you really want to, Microsoft Windows is source available with some hurdles. But I wouldn’t consider it open source - mostly because it cannot contribute to the ecosystem evolving.

        • ToxicWaste@lemm.eeOP
          11·
          1 year ago

          I have found three comments from you, where you insert yourself as an expert on what Open Source is/not is. Although you do link to some sources, you do so without arguing your point. IMO this is not a constructive way of communication. Since I believe your perspective is purist but overall not too helpful, I will go through the trouble an actually argue the point:

          Your problem is following sentence published by the OSI: “The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources.” Which FUTO does - they won’t allow you to put ads on top of their software and distribute it. But I hope that you would agree with me that GNU GPL is an Open Source License. However, they do have a copyleft which practically makes selling software impossible. If you use a library which uses the GPL, you have to make your sources available - which makes selling a compiled version a difficult task…

          If we look at Wikipedia, we see following sentence: “Generally, open source refers to a computer program in which the source code is available to the general public for use or modification from its original design.”, Grayjay fulfils this. Wikipedia continues: “{…}. Depending on the license terms, others may then download, modify, and publish their version {…}”, you are allowed to download and modify Grayjay. They do not allow you to commercially distribute your modifications, which is a license term.

          Lets look at a big OSS company. Red Hat writes: “An open source development model is the process used by an open source community project to develop open source software. The software is then released under an open source license, so anyone can view or modify the source code.” These criteria are fulfilled by the FUTO TEMPORARY LICENSE (Last updated 7 June 2023). Red Hat does not mention the right to redistribute anywhere I could find it.

          To those who actually read up to this point: I hope you find this helpful to form your own opinion based on your own research.