Florp, the Firefox fork with an awful name, is fully source-available again
Aatube@kbin.melroy.org to 
github.com
The repository for the previously private submodule is still called Floorp-private-components, though it's public.
https://blog.ablaze.one/4125/2024-03-11/ is a maintainer's official response to... Reddit, which crossposted me apparently. Hooray!
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike is not really open source. It's more like source available
Yep...when software advertised as "Open" uses that type licence, it goes straight to the trash.
Normally I'd agree, but it doesn't actually seem to be advertised as open source.
That said, it's still IMO a terrible licence for code, the "share alike" doesn't require sharing source code at all, because it's not designed for code.
Yeah my bad...the title of the post said Open Source when I first saw it and I never clicked on the repo itself
#FloorpDidNothingWrong
I’m curious to hear the philosophical reasons that lead you to feel so strongly about this.
I don't trust people who use misleading language. I'm fine with buying or using closed source or source available software, but don't call it open and don't say your 'F' is for Freedom.
Personally, when I read their blog post, I didn’t feel like I was being lied to. I felt like I was reading the words of a person who has not spent very much time speaking English. I do agree, however, that the language they happened to use is not entirely representative of what they’re doing, but I don’t think it was malicious.
Yeah, I wasn't talking about Floorp in particular. In fact, I read 'Open Source' from the Lemmy post title and attributed that language to Floorp itself.
After checking the project, I agree with what you've said here. Thanks for your thoughts
Why is "non commercial" such an issue? It has the same "we shouldn't tax billionaires because some day I might be a billionaire" vibe.
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Its not truely open source if its non commercial
Why not?
"Boohoo, people used my publicly available source to do their own thing and now I'm mad and want to get paid".
That's the gist of the article. Dev got butthurt that his project didn't take off and blames "forking".
And in fairness, isn't his project itself a fork? What is he paying to the upstream dev for use of their source code?
Give the guy a break. Theyre young, dumb and never knew it would explode like this.
Where the heck did you get "I want to get paid"?
All over the article you posted:
So hes forked the open source Firefox, added some polish, and is now miffed that others have taken his forked project and forked it themselves, because it cuts off a possible income stream he had planned. That code, the things he intended to profit from, is whats hidden in the "closed source" part of the repo. He says he will open source it eventually, likely after he figures out a way to profit from all of the code Mozilla kindly let him fork for free.
He doesnt want anyone else to profit from the hundreds of hours of code hes added to the millions of hours of free code hes currently trying to profit from. This is of course a very reasonable and consistent moral stance in line with common open source principles.
They didn't but open source enthusiasts hate it when developers even try to imply not wanting their contributions used without attribution, it's basically killing puppies in this community.
They'll only ever use it to make money themselves without anything in return just like the corporations who do the same but then they'll call themselves morally principled for reasons.
que a moron trying to explain why opensource developers should bend to their will about what "opensource" should be for them.
Eh, Im not even an open-source enthusiast. I just have low tolerance for people so full of themselves.
Florp, to me, is not a serious project and best avoided unless you like playing with random hobby toys. Not sure why people are so up in arms over what some random tiny hobby thing does
Linux was not a serious project and a random hobby toy things.
Try to be less condescending less time about other people's work.
Nothing you said invalidates what I just said.
I would not have used Linux in 1991 either, unless I was looking to play with a hobby toy.
I've gotta admit, it takes a lot of nerve to fork an open source project a bunch of other people put all this time and effort into, change a few lines of JavaScript here and there in the UI, then act like you wrote the damn thing.
The license looks to be Creative Commons non-commercial, which means it isn’t open source, only source-available.
To be clear: the license chosen prohibits anyone who forks floorp and includes these extra bits from trying to make money from it, but the developer still intends on publishing the source code so it can still be scrutinized.
Amended title. CC really isn't something one should be using for source code
Honest question: How is CC-BY-NC not open source?
The Open Source Definition
That’s one of many definitions.
It's also the most-accepted one.
It doesn’t appear to be.
TL;DR: Open source is meant to be open as in open for any use
But it is open for any use.
NC in CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 stands for non-commercial
Yea, I know. The license doesn’t restrict use. Anyone can use the software for any purpose. They just can’t sell it.
Commercial use is use
No, commercial exploitation is assumed ownership. It isn’t use. Open source is not CC0 — or at least that’s not the only possible open source license.
BTW, I agree that, in this case, the dev is just throwing a tantrum over using the wrong license for his earlier work.
You really shouldn’t apply a CC license to code. Someone who does that after saying what the dev said about not forking their open source code has no fucking clue what they’re talking about and is either about to spiral out or build something really dumb (or both).
Edit: yeah the dev seems pretty delusional
You think a malicious fork that only changed the branding would openly fork it on GitHub?
There are three visible forks that have any stars. All of them have one star. You’re telling me that a project that is so widely and maliciously repackaged has no normal forks with more than one star? Is this tech that only bad actors want to use and has no following in the open source community?
Where are these evil forks, how do we actually know they’re forks, and why are they still up if they’re breaking license?
Edit: Here is a fork with 200+ stars that isn’t a direct GH fork. Given its premise is an opinionated and branded Floorp, is it morally wrong for its maintainers to not contribute to Floorp (assuming they don’t only for the sake of argument)? Does your answer apply to fediverse server owners (eg Mastodon, Lemmy) whose premise is hosting an opinionated and branded instance often explicitly without the technical skill to suggest patches?
I also wonder which forks these are (should probably ask maintainers), but I do not get your point about Floorp or the three forks in the screenshot at all.
Because they didn't. Code was previously up under MPL, a permissive license
I haven't seen an instance that claims it doesn't use e.g. Lemmy when it's using it.
If a repo is very popular, it should have a lot of forks. The higher the upstream popularity, the higher the downstream popularity. When a dev makes a claim that there are a ton of malicious forks stealing IP, we can vet that claim by looking at the forks that respect the upstream. Big projects have a big community with big forks with many stars. The popular downstreams drive traffic to the upstream.
In this case, we have a couple hundred direct forks. That’s not a ton. Out of those, only three have stars. All of them only have one star. At face value, that could imply a few things: the repo is not very popular, the community is centralized around the upstream, or something else along those lines. Comparing this to other open source projects, our initial conclusion is that this is not a hugely popular repo and does not get a lot of development outside of its incredibly niche community.
Occam’s razor is a tool, not objective truth. Based on the facts as we can see them, this focus on forking from the dev is much more indicative of a burnout spiral, incredibly common in the FOSS community, than nefarious actors. If we see receipts, eg a collection of takedown requests on malicious forks attempting to claim ownership of the code, our analysis falls apart. That’s still a possibility, however remote.
Off topic but cross posting interesting threads from lemmy to Reddit and linking the lemmy thread is an interesting way for people to discover and move to Lemmy
The name is Floorp* not Florp.