- cross-posted to:
- opensource@lemmit.online
- cross-posted to:
- opensource@lemmit.online
Today FUTO released an application called Grayjay for Android-based mobile phones. Louis Rossmann introduced the application in a video (YouTube link). Grayjay as an application is very promising, but there is one point I take issue with: Grayjay is not an Open Source application. In the video Louis explains his reason behind the custom license, and while I do agree with his reason, I strong disagree with his method. In this post I will explain what Open Source means, how Grayjay does not meet the criteria, why this is an issue, and how it can be solved.
That is a weird way of wording it. In practice I doubt there are any OSI-approved licenses that prohibit standalone commercial distribution. If there were, you could trivially comply by just including a “hello world” program to make it an aggregate distribution.