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!
“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:
and since Floorp currently has no advertising, my own salary is, of course, zero. It’s just not going to last.
I have made many plans, including earning development money on this projects, but all have been derailed by open source projects.
There is some code in the closed source code to prepare for this. If these are forked, my hundreds of hours will have been wasted.
The purpose is to learn how to publish code that cannot be used for forking as open source.
I have to obligate the folks to choose whether they want to pay me or help me code.
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
Ablaze was high school students making random hobby projects. This one got popular and it has obviously had a negative effect on the dev (who is likely in university by now). Sounds like they are also feeling a sense of responsibility for things they aren’t responsible for.
It also sounds like they don’t really understand open source.
Their Twitter makes it seem like they aren’t having much fun.
Linux was not a serious project and a random hobby toy things.
Hello everybody out there using minix -
I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big andprofessional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I’d like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other 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.
And then people pretend there is any choice in the browser market. Yeah, between Google developed browser and mainly Google funded browser.
Ah yes, Google funding a browser to become their default search engine precludes using it
IMO The product is the most important along with being FOSS. You can always use a configured fork without Google funding
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 license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.
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 were forks that wanted to hide the fact that they were Floorp forks, forks that did not want to contribute to Floorp at all, forks that used the code for life and just changed the name of Floorp, and many other forks were born.
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?
The blog says specifically that FireDragon is not an issue. I am also curious about these forks.
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.
why are they still up if they’re breaking license?
Because they didn’t. Code was previously up under MPL, a permissive license
Does your answer apply to fediverse server owners (eg Mastodon, Lemmy) whose premise is hosting an opinionated and branded instance
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
