this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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You make some good points, but whether it exactly meets every criteria of open source software as per that definition or not, I really can't bring myself to care that much either way. I get that it's important to you, and that's fine, but not everyone cares that much about it. People can read and vet the source code, the intention of the project seems good, and the intention of the authors in deviating slightly from pure open source principles seems to be to protect their users from scammy clones, which also seems fine with me. TBH we're not really into strictly following the letter of the law in the pirate community, and if this app helps people to avoid surveillance capitalism and puts even the slightest dent in Google's massive profits then I'm all for it. Anyways, have a good one.
saying that prohibiting redistribution is just "deviating slightly from pure open source principles" is like saying that a dish with a bit of meat in it is just "deviating slightly" from a vegetarian recipe.
if you saw a restaurant labeling their food as vegetarian because their dishes were based on vegetarian recipes, but had some meat added, would you say that it seems like their intentions are good?
As I said in another comment, the way free open source software projects should (and can, and do) generally do this is using trademark law. He could license it under any free software license but require derivatives to change the name to avoid misleading or confusing users. This is what Firefox and many other projects do.
In the video announcing the project Louis Rossmann explicitly says he intends to vigorously enforce this license. Since it is a copyright license, the only ways of actually enforcing it are to send DMCA takedowns and/or sue people for copyright infringement.