AatubeFlorp, the Firefox fork with an awful name, is fully open source again
Florp, the Firefox fork with an awful name, is fully open... #floorp #firefox
https://github.com/Floorp-Projects/Floorp-private-components
NorthCountryHermit“Boohoo, people used my publicly available source to do their own thing and now I’m mad and want to get paid”.
That’s the gist of the article. Dev got butthurt that his project didn’t take off and blames “forking”.
Give the guy a break. Theyre young, dumb and never knew it would explode like this.
And in fairness, isn’t his project itself a fork? What is he paying to the upstream dev for use of their source code?
Where the heck did you get "I want to get paid"?
They didn’t but open source enthusiasts hate it when developers even try to imply not wanting their contributions used without attribution, it’s basically killing puppies in this community.
They’ll only ever use it to make money themselves without anything in return just like the corporations who do the same but then they’ll call themselves morally principled for reasons.
que a moron trying to explain why opensource developers should bend to their will about what “opensource” should be for them.
Eh, Im not even an open-source enthusiast. I just have low tolerance for people so full of themselves.
All over the article you posted:
and since Floorp currently has no advertising, my own salary is, of course, zero. It’s just not going to last.
I have made many plans, including earning development money on this projects, but all have been derailed by open source projects.
There is some code in the closed source code to prepare for this. If these are forked, my hundreds of hours will have been wasted.
The purpose is to learn how to publish code that cannot be used for forking as open source.
I have to obligate the folks to choose whether they want to pay me or help me code.
So hes forked the open source Firefox, added some polish, and is now miffed that others have taken his forked project and forked it themselves, because it cuts off a possible income stream he had planned. That code, the things he intended to profit from, is whats hidden in the “closed source” part of the repo. He says he will open source it eventually, likely after he figures out a way to profit from all of the code Mozilla kindly let him fork for free.
He doesnt want anyone else to profit from the hundreds of hours of code hes added to the millions of hours of free code hes currently trying to profit from. This is of course a very reasonable and consistent moral stance in line with common open source principles.
The license looks to be Creative Commons non-commercial, which means it isn’t open source, only source-available.
To be clear: the license chosen prohibits anyone who forks floorp from trying to make money from it, but the developer still intends on publishing the source code so it can still be scrutinized.
Amended title. CC really isn't something one should be using for source code
Honest question: How is CC-BY-NC not open source?
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. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.
That’s one of many definitions.
It's also the most-accepted one.
It doesn’t appear to be.
TL;DR: Open source is meant to be open as in open for any use
But it is open for any use.
starmanNC in CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 stands for non-commercial
Yea, I know. The license doesn’t restrict use. Anyone can use the software for any purpose. They just can’t sell it.
Commercial use is use
No, commercial exploitation is assumed ownership. It isn’t use. Open source is not CC0 — or at least that’s not the only possible open source license.
BTW, I agree that, in this case, the dev is just throwing a tantrum over using the wrong license for his earlier work.
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike is not really open source. It’s more like source available
Yep…when software advertised as “Open” uses that type licence, it goes straight to the trash.
I’m curious to hear the philosophical reasons that lead you to feel so strongly about this.
I don’t trust people who use misleading language. I’m fine with buying or using closed source or source available software, but don’t call it open source and don’t say your ‘F’ is for Freedom.
Personally, when I’ve read their blog post, I didn’t feel like I was being lied to. I felt like I was reading the words of a person who has not spent very much time speaking English.
Yeah, I wasn’t talking about Floorp in particular. In fact, I read ‘Open Source’ from the Lemmy post title and attributed that language to Floorp itself.
After checking the project, I agree with what you’ve said here. Thanks for your thoughts
RobotToasterNormally I’d agree, but it doesn’t actually seem to be advertised as open source.
That said, it’s still IMO a terrible licence for code, the “share alike” doesn’t require sharing source code at all, because it’s not designed for code.
Yeah my bad…the title of the post said Open Source when I first saw it and I never clicked on the repo itself
Why is “non commercial” such an issue? It has the same “we shouldn’t tax billionaires because some day I might be a billionaire” vibe.
NaNBecause many people are also fans of free software. www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
That just feels like communism: a nice, idealistic concept to achieve in its entirety but a good inspiration towards a better system. In the real world, both are ripe for exploitation. Communism is perfect for exploitation by power hungry humans, GNU software is perfect for exploitation by companies.
I'd understand if you said that the FSF feels like communism, but how the heck is that specific philosophy in support of selling FOSS software communism?
GNU philosophy feels like communism. Also that standard of purity - no exceptions.
If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license
This leads to people conflating non-free and opensource or tightly coupling opensource to FLOSS - even though F and L are qualifiers for OSS. OSS isn’t forcibly F and L. “X is not opensource because you can’t use it commercially nor sell it”.
FOSS was created as a compromise between the FSF and the OSI, and the latter's Open Source Definition includes this:
Free redistribution: 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. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.
Keep in mind that the OSI was made for the purposes of popularizing the term "open source", which was created because some wanted it to be more pragmatic than political. This is a consensus.
That’s really great for people living in the 1990s. However for people and businesses in the now, with megacorps taking advantage of their dominant positions to sell an opensource product without contributing back and killing the business that provides the opensource product, hanging on to a lucid dream mean the death of the opensource product and loss of livelihoods.
Staying purist in the face of reality is one thing: delusional.
Maybe someday we’ll have the alternative of “The morgue is full of people who had the right of way” for FLOSS purists who didn’t want to give in to reality.
Could you provide an example: Ideally a copyleft one
There are probably BSD derivatives that act that way.
Free software is very much like communism, the difference is that cloning something costs nothing, imagine if we could use a ray gun to clone any object, then communism would no longer be even remotely idealistic.
Both fail in certain areas once exposed to the real world. Communism fails because of human psychology and scale. Free software fails when competing against megacorps, those who don’t follow the spirit nor the letter of free software licenses, and when infringements are not enforced.
Megacorps don’t get to be megacorps by being nice. They will exploit anything to get ahead, and free software providing work for free is a benediction that they will happily exploit. People who get offended when free software providers defend themselves against such corps by changing their license to non-commercial or non-cloud compete are just victim blaming.
Its not truely open source if its non commercial
Why not?
NixOff topic but cross posting interesting threads from lemmy to Reddit and linking the lemmy thread is an interesting way for people to discover and move to Lemmy
axumFlorp, to me, is not a serious project and best avoided unless you like playing with random hobby toys.
Ablaze was high school students making random hobby projects. This one got popular and it has obviously had a negative effect on the dev (who is likely in university by now). Sounds like they are also feeling a sense of responsibility for things they aren’t responsible for.
It also sounds like they don’t really understand open source.
Their Twitter makes it seem like they aren’t having much fun.
Linux was not a serious project and a random hobby toy things.
Hello everybody out there using minix -
I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big andprofessional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I’d like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things).
Try to be less condescending less time about other people’s work.
Nothing you said invalidates what I just said.
I would not have used Linux in 1991 either, unless I was looking to play with a hobby toy.
I would not have used Linux in 1991 either, unless I was looking to play with a hobby toy.
You really shouldn’t apply a CC license to code. Someone who does that after saying what the dev said about not forking their open source code has no fucking clue what they’re talking about and is either about to spiral out or build something really dumb (or both).
You think a malicious fork that only changed the branding would openly fork it on GitHub?
There were forks that wanted to hide the fact that they were Floorp forks, forks that did not want to contribute to Floorp at all, forks that used the code for life and just changed the name of Floorp, and many other forks were born.
There are three visible forks that have any stars. All of them have one star. You’re telling me that a project that is so widely and maliciously repackaged only has no normal forks with more than one star? Is this tech that only bad actors want to use and has no following in the open source community?
Where are these evil forks, how do we actually know they’re forks, and why are they still up if they’re breaking license?
The blog says specifically that FireDragon is not an issue. I am also curious about these forks.
I also wonder which forks these are (should probably ask maintainers), but I do not get your point about Floorp or the three forks in the screenshot at all.
Does your answer apply to fediverse server owners (eg Mastodon, Lemmy) whose premise is hosting an opinionated and branded instance
I haven't seen an instance that claims it doesn't use e.g. Lemmy when it's using it.
If a repo is very popular, it should have a lot of forks. The higher the upstream popularity, the higher the downstream popularity. When a dev makes a claim that there are a ton of malicious forks stealing IP, we can vet that claim by looking at the forks that respect the upstream. Big projects have a big community with big forks with many stars. The popular downstreams drive traffic to the upstream.
In this case, we have a couple hundred direct forks. That’s not a ton. Out of those, only three have stars. All of them only have one star. At face value, that could imply a few things: the repo is not very popular, the community is centralized around the upstream, or something else along those lines. Comparing this to other open source projects, our initial conclusion is that this is not a hugely popular repo and does not get a lot of development outside of its incredibly niche community.
Occam’s razor is a tool, not objective truth. Based on the facts as we can see them, this focus on forking from the dev is much more indicative of a burnout spiral, incredibly common in the FOSS community, than nefarious actors. If we see receipts, eg a collection of takedown requests on malicious forks attempting to claim ownership of the code, our analysis falls apart. That’s still a possibility, however remote.
I've gotta admit, it takes a lot of nerve to fork an open source project a bunch of other people put all this time and effort into, change a few lines of JavaScript here and there in the UI, then act like you wrote the damn thing.
And then people pretend there is any choice in the browser market. Yeah, between Google developed browser and mainly Google funded browser.
Ah yes, Google funding a browser to become their default search engine precludes using it
melroyThe name is Floorp* not Florp.