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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] 0 points 4 years ago

Since I'm already here, I have another example.

So there's this Mario fangame called Super Mario Bros. X (which was proprietary to begin with), it was abandoned by its developer long ago but the community's still active. Some fans modded the original game and called it "SMBX2". Their homepage stated that "SMBX2 is an Open Source expansion" of the original game. Unsurprisingly, there was no source code to be found, anywhere. Not even a GitHub repo or anything.

This was discussed on a forum post, and people explained that the game used a framework licensed under the GPL. The OP had to explain to them that "A project doesn't become Open Source just because they are using Open Source things", which I absolutely agree with. Think of it this way: Microsoft uses BSD-licensed code in Windows, does that make Windows "open source"?

Sorry for the long post, had to get this out of my system.