PSA: Grayjay is really good
PSA: Grayjay is really good
cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/15242858
Saw Louis Rossmans original video on the app and figured (and it may well have been) it would be buggy and awful at that point. Decided to gike it a try, the app has all the options I could want for watching youtube, it's multiplatform to a much greater degree than Newpipe and it's forks.
The reason I don't ever expect to go back to Newpipe or Libretube is the plugins update through the app, meaning I can get bypasses to YouTubes bullshit as fast as they're developed.
Newpipe is usually updated quickly, but in my experience forks like Tubular that include sponsorblocks often delay me from getting that update.
Overall, very good experience so far!
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Stop promoting non foss software. There are plenty of foss apps
No. GrayJay is good and I'm glad I gave FUTO money for two licenses because it is worth paying for; "free" does not necessarily mean "as in dollars".
Also, did the irony of issuing orders to strangers in the very same attempt to "defend" (and I am being generous with that word) the ideals of free and open source software, not give you the slightest pause before posting?
It isn't free software as in it doesn't have a license that respects the 4 freedoms. If it was under a license that granted its users the irrevocable right to run, study, modify and distribute the source code without restriction then it would be considered foss.
It's free software as in, it's free. You can continue mumbling your nonsense in the corner of course, the rest of us have bigger issues than whether someone we don't actually know can use word "free" like everybody else.
The free software definition can be found here:
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
I have no issue paying for software or donating. What concerns me is the restrictions on the source code. I think Grayjay is popular simply because some YouTube star made it.
Or maybe because it's good? Have you tried the Occam's Razor thing? You need to realize that by and large, users could not possibly care any less about source code available if you gave them money for it.
And the software has upsides. Compared to NewPipe (what I had before):
- Updates in finite time after Youtube breaks something.
- Can actually log in with your youtube account, directly accessing your subscriptions and so on, instead of having go through the complicated export/unzip/import process every time you change your subscriptions and want to resync them.
- Includes more sources, and pretty heterogenuous ones at that. Nice all-in-one app.
And keep in mind, nobody who is not a gnu cares whether for some hyper-specific context that this post is not in, "free" can mean the sourcecode is freely available. The english language already uses the word "free" in everyday parlour, and if you use english, you know those uses. One of which being "costs you nothing". Trying to argue around that just makes people less likely to care about source code availability because frankly, you're being a dick to people for no bloody reason.
I guess you're unfamiliar with that user but basically their entire Lemmy existence is just arguing with people about the things they own or use because "my thing is better". They are very active in privacy communities and constantly start pointless arguments by being needlessly oppositional whenever someone dares to recommend or even discuss something that they don't personally use. I don't think it's trolling or bad faith, I think they just genuinely have real difficulty seeing the world from any point of view other than their own. Hence this idea that Grayjay can't possibly have users because people enjoy using it - there must be some other explanation, like that we're all Louis Rossmann fans.
I just see Grayjay as an imposter. It is less private and completely bans forking to start a new project.
Take a look at what is now the Fossify app suite. It was Simple mobile tools but that was bought out by some Israel firm. It was forked and is now Fossify mobile tools. The old Simple mobile tools is now not on F-droid.
If Grayjay turns into a scam there is no legal way you can fork it. You are completely locked in. That is my primary concern.
Yeah but every few years technology moves on, anyways. I no longer use the same video client I used 5 years ago on my mobile. Maybe in 5 years I'll use another. It's just an app, not a lifestyle. 🤷
It's just an app, not a lifestyle. 🤷
Now apply that thought to VLC and how many distros and apps use their libraries.
Yeah, I'm salty at them for diluting the term "Open Source".
And, yes, I'm more aligned with the Free Software movement than the Open Source movement. But in practice, all Open Source software is also Free Software, as long as they're not misusing the term "Open Source" like FUTO recently apologized for. (Though this page still says "All FUTO-funded projects are expected to be open-source or develop a plan to eventually become so." which I think is just a holdover from before they promised to stop misusing the term "Open Source" that they haven't caught and fixed yet.)
But still, their license is kindof shitty. And maybe it's just a narcissism of small diffrences thing, but it feels more nefarious in some ways than just a straight-forwardly proprietary license would be.
Anyway, no chance I'll ever use GrayJay unless they some day decide to put it under a properly FOSS license. Even if only because there's no way I'm going to go to the trouble of side-loading it or any Android app store other than the F-Droid I've got on my no-Google-apps LineageOS phone now.
And just in general purposefully and maliciously misusing terms like "Open Source" and "FOSS" is a pretty transparent capitalist scumbag move. And the "apology" for doing so is hardly an apology. They spend more of the apology casting shade at FOSS than apologizing. And then they have the gall to tell people that their shitty-ass GrayJay license is some panacea of consumer freedom or privacy? It's worse than any Open Source license. If they really wanted to address the consumer privacy and freedom isuses in tech, they'd use AGPL. But no, their "improvement" on the BSD/MIT-style licenses is "don't make any versions without 'pay FUTO money' buttons and don't charge for it." Good fucking job, FUTO, you fixed enshittification.
Bah. Yeah. I'm pissed at FUTO.
Thanks for your post. You're getting lots of downvotes, but I upvoted. Folks ought to know how scummy FUTO is. I don't really blame Rossman directly so much (though, honestly, I haven't really followed him enough to know.) I suspect he may just be kinda clueless about FOSS and got swept up in FUTO's rhetoric (even though there's no substance behind their rhetoric) that they're going to fix the industry or whatever. He just got pissed at Apple about their hostility to device repair (based), but then got hoodwinked by scummy capitalist bullshit.
I don't have any issue with Capitalism. Companies, people and ideas should complete to make them all better. However, the FUTO license is anti capitalistic as it grants GreyJay a monopoly over the software. You can not fork it and retain ownership of the code. The code is owned by them and you can't start a completing organization from a fork. If FUTO were to make GrayJay problematic by doing something such as adding invasive telemetry and ads then you couldn't hard fork the project.
Damn. Am I about to defend FUTO/GrayJay?
The license is a lot better than it was previously. (And by that I mean it's less worse than a basic MIT-style FOSS license, not that it's "good".) Now it does allow derivative works (just not derivative works that remove the "pay FUTO" button, and it doesn't allow selleing GrayJay or derivative works, and it requires a "prominent" notice if you've made changes.)
And the old version had a bit about how FUTO could change the terms at any time for no reason, which basically made it entirely useless.
You can not fork it and retain ownership of the code.
Technically, MIT-style licenses (let alone copy-left licenses) don't either, I'm pretty sure. Though that's more true in one sense of the GrayJay Core License than of Open Source licenses.
The fact that Greyjay prohibits anyone from making money off of means that a fork would be unable to happen.
Depends what you mean by "fork", really. I could clone it down, change something trivial, and run that on my phone for my own personal use. And that would qualify as a "fork" and be allowed by the license.
But I can't disagree that a well-maintained, long-lived, publicly-available fork (like, MPV was forked from MPlayer2 or Libreoffice from OpenOffice) seems very unlikely.
And I'd doubt a third party accepting donations even if they operated on a non-profit basis could be done given the wording.
What theoretically could be done is that a FOSS drop-in replacement for GrayJay (even one compatible with GrayJay plugins, many of which I've heard are actually FOSS.) Though anyone who undertook that would have to be careful to make it happen in a proper well-documented clean-room fashion.