Grayjay Desktop App

I love the right to repair work Louis Rossmann does, and this project goal as a whole, but this license is a major step backwards for software distribution with high assurances of security, freedom and privacy.

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.

FUTO develops, for the most part, proprietary software that they plan to monetize. The license choice isn't some mistake that you can get them to recant by explaining the virtues of the AGPL and third party distributors. (They're already aware of these things; one of the products under their umbrella is Immich, which was relicensed to AGPL after they started employing the original developer, as a compromise between his goals and FUTO's.) They're deliberately going for the same model as Unreal: source access is only provided a courtesy to users, and/or as part of a marketing strategy, and they have zero interest in allowing you to fork their software.

while that is technically mostly correct, that does not properly reflect their intentions. they most certainly are interested in allowing you to fork their software as a user. but what they are also interested in is to prevent a fork to take revenue from the original developers.

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.