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Projects promoted as FLOSS but which are neither Free Software nor Open Source (lemmy.ml)

submitted 4 years ago* (last edited 4 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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In the last years, I have seen plenty of users telling or promoting certain ultra-permissive rules as part of Open Source but which are not even in the definition like the use of read-only licenses, being a good example the MEGA software.

However, I didn't find exact source of these ideas and only believed in the misinformation of certain videos in *tube or similar.

Today, I was looking for a FLOSS VPN client to use at home as I use MATE DE and found Printunl Client promoted as Open Source. Or that was everything until I read the license.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 years ago (1 children)

Ah ok, I think back then it was something weird, like most of the code being open-source (the Chromium portion), then the Vivaldi-specific code was source-available, except for the assets, but you could get a hold of those assets by extracting them from the official build.

Thinking about it, I guess some may have actually thought that open-source == source-available, but I also distinctly remember someone delivering the explanation above to argue that it's technically open-source, because you could compile it yourself, if you really wanted to.

...which is not at all the definition of open-source, but yeah, you linked it above, I don't need to go into that.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 years ago (1 children)

I have to fix something in which I was wrong, even older releases, they only free the changes made to the Chromium codebase but maintaining a part of their own code, for the interface, as review-only license. Source: https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/privacy/is-vivaldi-open-source/

The concept of review-only is something I have seen mostly promoted as open source when it is not.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 years ago

Ah, thanks for posting that. I guess that horrible bullshit it's-still-practically-open-source excuse actually came from their own website.

Yes, what they wrote there is technically correct and technically they did not claim that they were open-source. But they also wrote it in the most confusing, most misleading way possible. That whole response should've began with "No, it's not open-source".