Thread last year https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37924776
replies(1):
I've been using a youtube frontend called pockettube, where I could make lists(channels) for content I like, without youtube forcing me what to watch.
Example. I have an Art and Food channels with my favorite content creators, I get to see the list in order of newest videos first, totally bypassing youtubes forced interface.
In fact, if people started creating front ends to youtube with real search/suggestion engines, you could find new content and help the less viewed but good content that gets bypassed.
Grayjay is great, since it uses multiple video providers, but you still have to "Know" who to follow. The search "Knowing" part is still word of mouth, random change of seeing a creators video, or the platforms showing it to you. Combine the 2, and it would be unstoppable.
I think if someone came up with a external database of content providers on multiple platforms that allows apps like grayjay/pockettube/etc to find new content, that is the missing piece.
Nit: the Linux release should use a compressed tarball, not .zip
Technically, I think this is against YouTube (for example) TOS, though I don’t expect that would be enforced against end users.
I would assume these privacy claims would also include a ToS violation for the given platform?
And then of course the user has given Grayjay a lot of info so privacy?
Are they scraping the actual content too or just accessing it in some different way?
All YouTube wants me to watch are "OMG YOU WOULDN'T BELIEVE WHAT THIS COP DID" content. I have no idea why they want me to watch those videos, I never do and I block the videos and the channels from recommendations but they keep coming ...
All I get are ads for weird suspect drugs and products, just going on these platforms is such a bad vibe.
Grayjay looks like it may be a solution!
You can check it yourself, while it is not "open-source" or "free" in the usual sense its source is available.
More details from Rossmann himself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqTYg6vnQvw
edit: TOS not API
Between that and pirated shows/movies my kids are absolutely puzzled by commercials when we stay at a hotel or with family.
Fortunately, you can easily edit your watch history. I just go through mine periodically and remove any kind of video that I don't want recommendations related to. Doing that has given me a very dialed in recommendation feed. If anything, it's too dialed in, and I rarely get serendipitous recommendations.
It mentions using the Harbor identity service, that's new to me. https://harbor.social/
"This URL contains malicious code that could harm your computer. If you’re willing to risk it, you can turn off your Avast Web Shield to continue. But we strongly recommend walking away from this one."
Part of this is channels opening side or mirror channels that they upload their videos to as well (since you'll sometimes see the exact same video but no ContentID strike) so they can get around people doing that.
https://github.com/futo-org/Grayjay.Desktop/blob/373cd8448cb...
(It has to be subscription payment to deal in a scaleable and timely manner with sites changing their page schemas anticompetitively.)
It's backed by Louis Rossmann, who does a lot of right to repair advocacy, among other things.
Some screenshots would be a nice addition to their page.
Grayjay – Follow Creators Not Platforms - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37924776 - Oct 2023 (106 comments)
freetube shows shorts in the same way it shows normal videos, just in a separate category. you have to look for them and click to see them and they don't push you to jump to the next one, and most importantly they are not random, just your subscribed channels.
some channels use them as intro/overview for their longer videos which i find useful. other channels use them for stupid stuff which i ignore.
you can ignore them completely if you want. freetube also has a category for livestreams, which i ignore to the point that i forget it's there.
grayjay could support shorts in the same way.
If you're opposed to using a separate app just for this, you can achieve something similar using an RSS reader and YT's official RSS feeds (which I'm surprised they still publish tbh).
I didn't find a feedback button on the app itself, so if the authors are reading, some things I miss from using YouTube's website:
- Videos in new tabs; - Search bar always visible.
Youtube is doing better here for me in that respect than it used to. Once a week for the past month I get a button that asks if i want to see things it doesn't usually show me and I've even watched some of them. It's not perfect, but it does seem like they are trying.
It feels extremely suspicious, given that I download lots of other popular utility software from independent devs and I've never had to do that before.
[1] 5.2.2, 5.2.3: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#int...
[2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/04/federal-judge-rules-it...
I don't know why this app would need Apple's signature in the first place, seeing as it's not distributed through the app store. Is this like how you need to pay for a certificate to make the "are you sure you want to run this" prompt look less scary?
In my opinion at least, the most likely reason is that Apple is refusing to notarize the software. If this is the case, people really should not be running it.
The removal of that feature was an intentional push to take away user agency and push them into using YouTube's recommendation algorithm. The lying was a way to misdirect user complaints until it was too late.
Maybe there can be a website where people share subscription groups with each other in general. Good archery channels, good fitness channel, kid safe channels, etc.
Another thing I am pondering is if it is worth adding a mode that prevents your kids from accessing other content then what is in a specific subscription group.
It does adjust in some way, but somehow it never picks up on the signal that actually made me like or dislike a video. It's very clear that some video-makers have figured out how to exploit this poor signal reception to shove really crappy content at people. Other video-makers, who aren't trying to dominate youtube revenue, are buried and difficult to find.
TikTok, meanwhile, takes about an hour of scrolling and reacting to cultivate a feed that is very tailored to my taste. It's truly remarkable. If the app gets banned it'll be a huge loss for finding people and content with similar interests.
(I also just don't have the desire to watch an entire 10-minute video packed with filler when I'm trying to relax unless it's very dense, and that's the entire revenue model of youtube. edit: I forgot youtube has shorts now)
my workaround to getting different topics separated have been to have multiple YouTube channels inside a single account, each with separate likes/sub channels/recommendations etc. one per Firefox container.
Regardless of what I watch, in the middle of otherwise on-topic recommendations, there will always be one or two videos that are attempts at getting me to engage with some complete off-topic inflammatory political bullshit. Of course, once you click on that, the "regular" recommendation system takes over and feeds you more of that (which is somewhat fine), but the fact that it's trying to suck the user into this in the first place despite no indications the he desires to be exposed to such content in the first place is disgusting.
Directories:User Directory: /home/bisby/Grayjay
And there is a directory there now. I absolutely hate having stuff automatically create anything in my home directory like this. Ideally, this should be following XDG directory guidelines on linux: https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/latest/
Pretty soon all the recommendations are way far off what I would ever watch, because of course i don’t want to watch everything YouTube has. There is a point where there is nothing left that I will ever wanted to watch.
Cuts down a ton of crap and shows you thumbnails and titles of things for what they really are.
As a linux user I wanted to make sure to say thank you for supporting and thinking about linux!
here is a list of 100+ not official fdroid repositories. https://github.com/userkilled/FDroid-List-Repository
https://github.com/disable-gatekeeper/disable-gatekeeper.git...
You can find the feed URL by inspecting the HTML of the youtube.com/channel/.../videos page and searching for "rssUrl"; it'll look like `www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC...`
Downside: this feed will contain premieres, shorts and livestreams in addition to videos and AFAIK there's no way to filter those out. Depending on the channel, the title might make it obvious whether it's one of those.
F-That
I bought in right away too. Louis gave a rundown on the idea; namely, you can pay for it, or not pay for it, and in either case we are going to do our best to make it work for you, and maybe those you recommend it to.
Nice. Happy to support thinking like that.
Seems like people are finally annoyed at being controlled on what they are fed while they consume content. Thats what i like about grayjay, it embraced that freedom of the original internet, not letting corps control what you, putting the control back into the hands of the viewers.
I toyed with an idea for a patreon clone, that would allow users to post a thumbnail to their video, and underneath quick links to other hosting providers. So the main choice is upto the creator, but also allow users to choose a different content streamer. I always hated how these services controlled creators too. What stores they can use.
The idea of a "plugin" or provider, creators could pick their merch store provider even. Such ideas of opening a system to different companies, making competition.
This would be nice to see in GreyJay.
Edit: Oh never mind! I just took the update, and it is in the can now!
You guys rock. Thank you.
I think just letting the primary account specify creators/channels and then have a sub accounts with no ability to modify would be sufficient.
Im sure there are already all sorts of recommendation groups or sites, maybe just provide links to quality ones?
Could you look at supporting a Flatpak for Linux? If unsure, I'll happily throw a manifest together and post it on a MR.
I’m coming from the perspective that lots of great intentioned ppl who want to buck a social norm, run up against obstacles and the have to start compromising, eventually reverting back to the norm. A founder has to make an unsavory deal with an investor, or they get fired, or they cash out…
Jim Jones started out as an idealist. Putin was super popular early on.
Generally I put my faith in systems, and consider human nature as more of a constant, dependent more on situation than individual over the long term.
Even with the "Portable" file, it creates a directory `/home/bisby/Grayjay`. I don't want that. No app should ever put a file or directory directly in `/home/bisby` without me asking it to. The Linux standard for "where should an app put it's files" is defined the XDG spec that I had previously linked (https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/latest/).
The summary is that user specific data should live in $XDG_DATA_HOME and config should live in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME (and various other things like $XDG_CACHE_HOME). If these values are unset, there are predefined places to put the files (eg, data in $HOME/.local/share or config in $HOME/.config, cache in $HOME/.cache).
This puts all the Grayjay data in places like /home/bisby/.config/Grayjay (instead of /home/bisby/Grayjay) which is nested away inside a hidden directory and structured in a consistent way.
This would be the equivalent of putting data in %AppData% in windows instead of cluttering someone's "My Documents" (or whatever the modern equivalent of that is).
Some of the Linux decisions feel a bit like linux is a complete afterthought, but included because Linux users tend to agree with the FUTO philosophies. That is a reasonable thing given the Linux market share, and for "Build Version: 2" that I'm seeing the app info, I'm grateful that linux is included this early. This looks like it can probably replace freetube for me. However, it would go a long way if things are done to make sure they are done the "right way" on Linux (ie, on packaging and on directory specs).
Thanks for the work you've done on freeing up the web.
Your pitch mentions ‘privacy centered design’. Yet what you add to my world from a privacy perspective is a new custodian of my data on par with my telecom provider (highly regulated for me in California) or my Apple Browser. Apple I currently trust, because they continue to show signs of being good stewards, and they make enough money elsewhere to continue to afford the moral high ground. You guys, I need to trust that 1) you permit no 3rd party managed plugins in the client, 2) you won’t inject analytics software of your own.
I’m not managing the version of the client I download from your site, you guys do that.
EDIT: We are transitioning to a world where Govt jobs are currently being handed out by party affiliation, right now Charlie Kirk is vetting candidates for DOGE based on loyalty. There is nothing to stop companies doing the same, and I assume many of them do, with a simple review of a person’s social media activity before hiring.
This next political cycle is going to be dominated by data weaponization at a personal level IMO.
edit: it's not actually open source by the OSI definition it seems [1], but it is reasonably close.
You would probably look weird at an software that installs itself in C:\MYAWESOMEAPPLICATION instead of using the Windows program folder like literally every other piece of software (except for legacy stuff like LTSpice). Creating visible directories in the home folder without asking is the Linux equivalent of doing just that.
Check if the XDG environment variables are set and store your stuff in these places — as it is now can be used as a last resort fallback. For reading config/data you do the same.
[1] https://github.com/nix-community/nix-ld [2] https://github.com/Mic92/envfs
The blog post linked by [1] is quite good.
The stupid thing is that it’s entirely believable that Google would have multiple competing video platforms. Certainly they tend to have half a dozen competing chat things alive at any give point in time, two or three with the same name for bonus confusion.
(The sentence could do with a comma: “One of the biggest video platforms, owned by Google”.)
Maybe your interests are shared by a lot of people who also like crappy stuff? Just joking, but there must be some reason for the difference in experience.
I'd definitely consider this as being "available on F-Droid".
The most insidious thing is when you see kids hooked on it. Not only are they fed the same garbage content and ads, some of it is actually harmful, like Elsagate. Some of those videos are still available on the site, and more get added all the time.
We can argue whether parents should let their kids use YouTube, and if the YouTube Kids app works well enough to protect them from this, but at the end of the day we're just data mines and not customers, so nothing besides public outrage and regulations could improve this. It's also an incredibly difficult problem given the amount of videos uploaded every day, but I'm sure Google could solve it if they had good reasons to.
So for example, I could be watching some niche technical videos, and my recommendations would be more of that for the most part. Except that on an English-speaking-country IP address, I'd also get some inflammatory Trump-related video among the usual recommendations. On a French IP I get the French equivalent, and so on.
So either consumers of various niche content (in unrelated fields, from retrocomputing to farming or vehicle repair) also all happen to be into political trash in various languages so much as to outcompete other on-topic videos in the recommendations, or the recommendation engine has an explicit feature to push inflammatory crap in addition to "organic" recommendations. I strongly suspect it's the latter.
How I display, download or request data without an account and which browser or app I use to do it is still my choice. I'd guess if they could do anything about it, they would have half a year ago. The only way would be to DRM/widevine all videos and apparently they aren't ready for that yet. If they block my IP I'll just get a new one.
I wouldn't even be thinking about using a 3rd party app or blocking the ads if their service was reasonable. No way I will endure that, if they block it I'll just watch something else.
I stand by the points I made, but I could have been friendlier. I normally make an effort to be friendly as I can about things, but I absolutely did not here. I hope that nothing I said came across as vitriol, but rather, valid criticism. I'm a strong believer in criticizing the things you love, but I need to remember that random comments on HN aren't the place where people know I love the thing, and my criticism needs context.
So no, it wasn't really that odious, but it was other things. Do I feel stricken with guilt or remorse about what I said? No. Could I have been friendlier? yes. Should I have been friendlier? Probably.
> It looks like F-Droid does not have any apps matching your search string "grayjay"
You're using a third-party repo that allows proprietary apps. The real F-Droid only allows FOSS ones.
So no, "portable" is not what you want. If you launch it as non-portable and it drops a folder in ~, then that is a problem.
But either way, Portable mode isn't behaving portably because it's touching directories outside of the current directory, and non-portable mode is putting data in ~/Grayjay instead of ~/.config/Grayjay so it doesn't do what I want it to do in any mode.
I'm quite happy actually that while this is a HUGE annoyance... It's also only an annoyance, and VERY simple to fix (as long as they do). Which means that this app is likely going to wind up as a daily driver for me once a few things get ironed out. I see the concept and structure of the app, and I like it.
I don't understand the weird tone policing that people are trying to do, there is literally nothing wrong with the parent's comment and pretending otherwise is weird.
Also I still find it funny that OpenSSH client shipped via feature uses %HOMEDIR%\.ssh
NewPipe doesn't need an account. I can subscribe to channels, bookmark videos and save them to playlists. It's all I need.
Not having an account has the disadvantage that I don't have a common list of videos across my devices. I could export and import but it's too inconvenient. I just share videos to the other device if I have to, via KDE Connect.
Debian, Arch, Guix, F-droid or any other independent signed reproducible build channels require a true Open Source license to function legally.
The license thus forces users to download unsigned non-reproducible binaries off grayjay servers and trust blindly that their build server is creating binaries from exactly the published code and not compromised to inject tracking or malware not in the public repo (an increasingly common attack they may not even know about for years!). Or say the grayjay domain is hijacked or even a BGP attack or a LAN MITM. All sorts of ways they could be helping distribute malware and not know it with no signatures or reproducible build proofs.
Thing is, your team would not have to solve these problems if you licensed it so the community could solve them for you, as we do for thousands of open source software projects.
I really want to see a project like this take off and would gladly donate, but only if it can be opened up for accountability via third party compilation and distribution channels so it can never be backdoored or co-opted for surveillance if your leadership or release engineers are ever compromised.
Said license: https://github.com/futo-org/Grayjay.Desktop?tab=License-1-ov...
There are other licenses like AGPL that would kill any attempt for someone to rip your code off to make their own proprietary offering, without locking yourself out of established freedom, security, and privacy preserving software distribution channels.
If anyone from the team is reading this, I would be happy to detail and discuss my concerns further as a software supply chain security specialist. Hit me up.
The F-droid team does not have a high bar to be dicks. They do it to ensure their users get binaries that match the published code to prevent increasingly supply chain attacks.
The standards are there for good reason, and if you do not understand those reasons, then use a license that allows the people that do understand to distribute your software for you.
Very very few software engineers understand supply chain attacks or how to prevent them.
- the channel id by youtube channel url
- the duration + aspect ratio (<= 3 min + vertical = short)
- whether or not it's a live / future video
This is unclear to me, what does “not entirely done” mean in this context? Has the process been started and they are waiting for Apple?
Who decides what is cool? That's right, the marketing departments of huge corporations...
My only correct way today is create your own home dir inside your home dir to combat this hell hole of never ending config junk in your home dir
(a FOSS license would also work, but if I have learned something in HN before, is that don't FOSS if you ever want to make money from something while preventing others from making money off of it)
[0]: https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/basic-concepts.html
[1]: https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/sandbox-permissions.html
so you can most likely (i don't know the details) fork and change and redistribute the code. what you can not do is exploit that commercially.
this goes in the directions of the discussions started by bruce perens that we need to rethink FOSS, because funded companies are taking advantage and making a profit from FOSS without paying the developers.
it is not obvious that FUTO's approach is the right one. it is an attempt at addressing the problem, and i expect that it will take more such experiments to shake out what the best approach to this problem really is.
> 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.
>You may not alter, remove, or obscure any licensing, copyright, or other notices of the Licensor in the software. Any use of the Licensor’s trademarks is subject to applicable law.
To me that says that if FUTO decide to paywall the entire app, nobody is allowed to fork it to remove that.
>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.
>You may not alter, remove, or obscure any licensing, copyright, or other notices of the Licensor in the software. Any use of the Licensor’s trademarks is subject to applicable law.
To me that says that if FUTO decide to paywall the entire app, nobody is allowed to fork it to remove that.
I'm curious to hear more, because I'm in the process of evaluating licenses for a software I'm planning to build and sell. For me it's important that users can feel safe with running my code and build it themselves - and keep using the software if I'm no longer around to maintain it. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.
For a company, the product itself, what makes money, cannot be OSS, as it makes its resell value effectively zero. If the software was OSS, then the software is _not_ the product, but added values are (support, consulting, etc... the classic trope)
But if the software itself wants to be the product, and is created by devs who require their monthly salary, typically the question is between a non-FOSS license or it not existing at all to begin with. Not between a non-FOSS and a FOSS license.
I don't have a strong opinion on whether this licensing approach is right or wrong, I just doubt "anyone from the team" would find lrvick's post a compelling argument for switching to a free software license considering their stated goals.
Grayjay also uses a plugin model, possibly for this exact reason. On the other hand, the infringing plugins are first-party and advertised via their website, so I somewhat doubt that either Google or Apple would allow it on their stores.
literally just, what are their thoughts on that. do people deserve being paid? or don't? and if they don't and it's not worth paying for, how is it still worth watching? what is this bizarre mix of disdain and yet desire and entitlement to things, that they'll try to get them in whatever roundabout way, instead of just not watching the thing?
insisting viewers "pay" by subjecting themselves to ads is an unethical business model; refusing to support the practice is a rational reaction.
What it's trying to bypass is walls being put in place by Youtube after it established itself as a monopoly by leveraging technologies that worked and succeeded because of their no-walls philosophy.
Considering the whole point of this app is to remove monetisation from YouTubers, I think this is completely unreasonable.
It is literally one of the fundamental freedoms mentioned by Richard Stallman. Freedom to sell the software.
AGPL just closes the cloud service loop where someone can take your code, modify it and deploy it and offer it as a cloud service. As they’re not technically “distributing” the modifications they wouldn’t be required to release their changes by regular GPL but they would by AGPL.
IANAL
Yet I still have to watch a lot of ads there, since for a large chunk of content creators, the economic model of Youtube doesn’t seem to work and they additionally include inline ads.
There is much more to monetization than AdSense, which is adblocked away very frequently already. If it wasn't already removed by YouTube for saying something pg-14 or falsely copywright striked.
> "full ownership" - of what?
By a reasonable and charitable reading: full ownership over your legally-obtained copy of the material that folks (the creators/rightsholders themselves) are publishing for gratis online for anyone to watch, and likely some non-gratis stuff that you are paying these creators for if you are a subscriber and decide to enter your account details into the app.
This whole app looks to be a video player that works like an alternative frontend to the official players by e.g. YouTube, Twitch, and so on, in the vein of "unity of interface"[1] and a continuation of the spirit of the Miro player (see also: virtually every podcast app in existence).
You seem, bizarrely, to be responding to it like a new KaZaA or Popcorn Time or other torrent-backed something-or-other.
> just don't watch
Is your position a value judgement on the morality of not watching ads + technology that enables you to watch as few as possible? Or on the societal fixation to consume junk?
If the former, please elaborate on your position as it relates to VCRs and DVRs of the sort that are built-in to DirecTV receivers.
> i just find the tension and contradictions of piracy kinda fascinating
You're calling watching a TV show without watching the commercials "piracy"? That's a very broad definition of "piracy" that I'd venture has almost no support outside of your comments here.
What is considered impolite in the US or the UK is considered just being straightforward in e.g. Scandinavia.
I am German, we're kind of in the middle between someone from e.g. Finland and someone from e.g. or the UK or US with what we consider "ok" or rather crossing into rude territory.
A common exchange I witnessed in a meeting at work (Nokia):
Finnish developer: And if we follow this suggestion we will all look like idiots.
UK developer: I hear you.
Deciding which one is more impolite or impolite at all is left as an exercise to the reader. ;)
You get my point.
FUTO is not xerox. and i disagree that xerox is responsible for allowing free software to be developed. furthermore, the right to commercial exploitation is not what drove the idea of free software. commercial exploitation was necessary because otherwise selling tapes and other media with free software on them would not have been possible. today where distribution of software can be done pretty much without any cost at all, this right is no longer needed in just to be able to fork and distribute an application.
it is only needed if i want to be able to commercially exploit the changes i make to the application. this is where free software and these new source available licenses diverge. and this divergence is the entire point of these new licenses.
also historically there used to be an active community of the development of non-commercial software. many MUDs for example had a non-commercial license and each one of them was forked many times over.
It can. I work for XWiki SAS, and we sell some extensions under LGPL at store.xwiki.com. And it works, people and especially companies, choose convenience over installing the tools to compile and install the extensions themselves. It works because it's usual and easy to understand for companies to pay for software, and way easier to justify than donations to sponsor free software.
There are also several open source Android or iOS apps that you can buy. OSMAnd+, Conversations, DAVx⁵, Amaze Tools, Fair apps and are/were examples of this
A good example is for-sale Wordpress plugins. There are entire sites/communities for using the FOSS license to take those for-sale plugins and redistributing them for free. The RedHat debacle is another example although with some more nuance. Standard Notes had a similar situation.
It looks like the FUTO license is trying to prevent someone from stripping the payment features and redistributing. Personally I prefer when folks use a FOSS license but I think the “you can get paid for FOSS” argument is overly optimistic.
Yes, it is. It takes only a few minutes to comply with the XDG spec. If an author can't be bothered to do that, he probably hasn't bothered to make his program secure, stable, or extensible either. XDG non-adherence is a strong negative quality signal.
> I absolutely hate having stuff automatically create anything in my home directory like this.
Which is
> I absolutely hate <action> like this
Which is not
> I absolutely hate <thing that does action> like this
I quite like grayjay. I just dislike this one thing it does.
In this case I feel that the answer might ultimately be that it works because it is mostly a niche market and there are other value adds such as support from the makers themselves, which is always a good thing but already is not the software itself per se.
I don't think many companies would be confortable with such a brittle grasp on their sales. Basically it relies on nobody else wanting to do the same (and maybe risk that they execute better).
Imagine if Photoshop was OSS... well, it is good food for thought.
(EDIT re. the apps you mention: also interesting cases; not sure how much that model is actively hurting them or otherwise helping them, would love to see writeups from the companies or creators)
Like others said, fighting the clean HOME fight is just draining and futile in the end. This script helps you identify low hanging fruit, though, where you can change their storage location with a simple envvar.
To make a small correction, the AGPL relicensing happened _before_ joining FUTO, and was not a compromise.
(I'm part of the Immich team)
Here, it is just some extensions that are in a repository that is enabled by default in the main product (which is free and open source). Someone forking would not have their repository enabled by default. They could of course distribute their own version of XWiki itself with their repository enabled by default. The extensions we sell also come with some basic support, so there's also that. At some point, if someone forks and sells for cheaper, they'll also need to provide the fixes and the features asked by their customers, at which point they'll not be able to keep up with cheap prices.
I suspect a former colleague who now works as a freelance might be distributing some of these apps to their customers (they contribute some fixes from time to time through pull requests).
I guess if it happens more largely we'd figure something out. Now, it's also not our main income. You might be right that it's niche enough to fly under the radar. Forking and maintaining a cheaper copy might also not be lucrative enough: the apps we sell answer needs of existing customers anyway, so we need to write this code anyway, but someone external would probably find something more lucrative to do with their time. I don't know :-)
Another good example I didn't think about in my first comment is WordPress extensions with their premium plans. Because of the WordPress license, you are forced to distribute your WordPress extension as open source. And this is probably less niche, for the biggest extensions.
Right now everything that xdg-ninja finds are all things with a .prefix and hidden. which is whatever. if this was ~/.grayjay, I probably would have rolled my eyes but not even bothered to comment. I'm not a stickler about XDG, but I am a bit of a stickler about not cluttering my home directory.
This is the point number one in their free software guideline,