The repository for the previously private submodule is still called Floorp-private-components, though it’s public.
https://blog.ablaze.one/4125/2024-03-11/ is a maintainer’s official response to… Reddit, which crossposted me apparently. Hooray!
“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.
Where the heck did you get “I want to get paid”?
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.
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike is not really open source. It’s more like source available
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.
Because many people are also fans of free software. https://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.
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.
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.
Yep…when software advertised as “Open” uses that type licence, it goes straight to the trash.
Normally 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
#FloorpDidNothingWrong
Florp, to me, is not a serious project and best avoided unless you like playing with random hobby toys. Not sure why people are so up in arms over what some random tiny hobby thing does
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’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
IMO The product is the most important along with being FOSS. You can always use a configured fork without Google funding
