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As I understand it, GrayJay is not free (as in they want to be paid, which is I think is reasonable). How does this work with something like AGPL?

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.

discuss

akdev1l|1 year ago

There’s literally nothing in any open source software license that stops the author from getting paid.

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

lurkshark|1 year ago

This comes up occasionally and while it’s 100% true FOSS doesn’t mean you can’t get paid, any sufficiently big project is going to get folks repackaging it without the payment component.

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.

madeofpalk|1 year ago

> as in they want to be paid, which is I think is reasonable

Considering the whole point of this app is to remove monetisation from YouTubers, I think this is completely unreasonable.

saintfire|1 year ago

Well that's not actually the point. It's heavily focused on preventing deplatforming creators.

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.