Their source license says so, you don’t need a third party app to read it
Well, if GrayJay is FOSS (Though FUTO is a corporation, like Proton, which strongly supports privacy), yet it doesn’t quite qualify to be FOSS, what happens in this unusual situation?
Their license is not FSF or OSI approved, it does not grant you the freedoms, so it’s not FLOSS, it’s “source available” or so
Then why do they have an F-Droid repository?
Anyone can have a repo, and host whatever they want in it, FLOSS or not.
You want to add their repo? Make sure you read their ToS, PP and do your own research
NeoStore had it available without any questions.
maybe now you can understand why F-Droid & Basic don’t have any third party repos outside our control
But still, if GrayJay can actually hold up compared to NewPipe, does that really concern F-Droid as a whole?
never said it does, I just get triggered when people recommend Grayjay, FUTO Keyboard, Voice, etc as “FLOSS”
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Grayjay’s source code is publicly available, but it is source available rather than open source because its licensing does not meet the criteria of the Open Source Initiative. The project itself provides access to source code, but uses a custom licensing approach, which restricts and prohibits.
FYI, there is a GrayJay rant thread in this forum. Please use that.
So, what is GrayJay anyway? Proprietary, or pseudo-FOSS (Due to very limited interaction with Google Play Services, something F-Droid always tries to limit interaction with)?
“Source available”
Again, doesn’t give much information.
You need to read GrayJay stuff. Also, I already explained above. You seem to have not read it.
Well, I could read it more…
Grayjay is non-free because its license does not grant the four freedoms to its users. For example, this is a substantial restriction on “freedom zero” which is the freedom to use the software for any purpose:
You may use or modify the software only for non-commercial purposes such as personal use for research, experiment, and testing for the benefit of public knowledge, personal study, private entertainment, hobby projects, amateur pursuits, or religious observance, all without any anticipated commercial application.
This alone is enough to make it qualify as proprietary but there are also substantial restrictions on the other three freedoms:
You may distribute the software or provide it to others only if you do so free of charge for non-commercial purposes.
Notwithstanding the above, you may not remove or obscure any functionality in the software related to payment to the Licensor in any copy you distribute to others.
It is “source available” because you can see its source code but that does not make it free software. Its license is a proprietary license. Freeness is about what you’re allowed to do with the software.
In other words, “source availability” is necessary but not sufficient to make something free software. All free software is source-available but not all source-available software is free. Grayjay and FUTO keyboard are instances of the latter.
“Interaction with Google” is not relevant to whether something is free software, nor is whether something is “private” or has internet permissions or trackers or whatever else privacy people/degooglers care about. Only the four freedoms matter.
Unfortunately whomever submitted is mistaken, and so is the maintainer of LibreFind. This is why it’s important that people who maintain these lists of “FOSS alternatives” actually understand what FOSS means. I assume the LibreFind maintainer did not really do his due diligence and simply trusted whomever submitted it, which is unfortunate.
Unfortunately I think in order to flag it for review one has to have a LibreFind account which I find to be an unnecessary hurdle. I am assuming at least one other person flagged this for review though.
But, usually Proprietary usually connects to a big service (Google, Samsung, Apple, Windows, SONY, Nintendo, and any of the other big corporations that sell hardware), FUTO isn’t affiliated with these (Thus they’ll be impacted by Google’s Developer Verification as well). Now that raises an interesting question: If we change the definition of Proprietary, we essentially create a new definition. Proprietary refers to software that is connected to one of the big corporations (As Stated above), Independent refers to software that isn’t FOSS but isn’t connected to the big corporations enough to be considered Proprietary, and FOSS will refer to software that follows FOSS guidelines or is old enough to be busted open and decompiled into a FOSS alternative. Which would likely bring Star Fox 64, Mario Kart 64 & Super Mario 64 into this discussion, because they were decompiled recently, approaching that FOSS status, which of course is going to raise a lot of questions on whenever FOSS will have to make another definition for those decompiled games & applications, we could be seeing the beginning of DFOSS (Decompiled Free Open-Source Software) & SFOSS (Standard Free Open-Source Software), and that would really throw a monkey wrench into F-Droid’s future.
That’s not true, nor does it matter.
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Well, to me it matters greatly.