In the last years, I have seen plenty of users telling or promoting certain ultra-permissive rules as part of Open Source but which are not even in the definition like the use of read-only licenses, being a good example the MEGA software.

However, I didn’t find exact source of these ideas and only believed in the misinformation of certain videos in *tube or similar.

Today, I was looking for a FLOSS VPN client to use at home as I use MATE DE and found Printunl Client promoted as Open Source. Or that was everything until I read the license.

    • Ephera
      7•3 years ago

      Yeah, but it’s fine, because
      Microsoft ❤️ [making money off of] Open-Source.

    • @Echedenyan@lemmy.mlOP
      3•3 years ago

      Yeah. I only have account for making reports and to avoid making microshit account for my sysadmin course as teachers use tools from microshit imagine.

  • Ephera
    12•3 years ago

    Yeah, Vivaldi is another one where I’ve been misled to think that it’s open-source.
    I don’t believe it was ever officially communicated as such, but people have been claiming that it was open-source, presumably because open-source==good and they were fanboying for it.

    I’ve made it a habit when I find a new open-source project to check whether it even links a code repo and what license it has.

    • @Echedenyan@lemmy.mlOP
      7•3 years ago

      Vivaldi is propietary with the exception of old released whose source code is released as a permissive FLOSS license, but only old versions.

      • @AgreeableLandscape@lemmy.mlM
        8•3 years ago

        Bit of a sidenote, but Vivaldi is just another Chromium browser. If I had to use Chromium, I’d rather use the Ungoogled fork, even if it’s not perfect at removing everything Google because they’ve made themselves so damn pervasive in the codebase.

      • Ephera
        4•3 years ago

        Ah ok, I think back then it was something weird, like most of the code being open-source (the Chromium portion), then the Vivaldi-specific code was source-available, except for the assets, but you could get a hold of those assets by extracting them from the official build.

        Thinking about it, I guess some may have actually thought that open-source == source-available, but I also distinctly remember someone delivering the explanation above to argue that it’s technically open-source, because you could compile it yourself, if you really wanted to.

        …which is not at all the definition of open-source, but yeah, you linked it above, I don’t need to go into that.

          • Ephera
            4•3 years ago

            Ah, thanks for posting that. I guess that horrible bullshit it’s-still-practically-open-source excuse actually came from their own website.

            Yes, what they wrote there is technically correct and technically they did not claim that they were open-source. But they also wrote it in the most confusing, most misleading way possible. That whole response should’ve began with “No, it’s not open-source”.

    • GadgeteerZA
      4•3 years ago

      Yes I was really into Vivaldi for the vertical tabs and ditched them after I heard their pathetic reason for not being open source, yet building on top of open source.

  • @lnxprcy@lemmy.ml
    9•3 years ago

    Hope someone can create a list of licenses or projects that don’t meet the definition.

    • @Lowey@lemmy.ml
      4•3 years ago

      On that note, there’s now EPL(European)

      Note: it’s more like AGPL or GPL, it meets the definition just wanted to tell it exists.

    • @Echedenyan@lemmy.mlOP
      2•3 years ago

      I think projects would be better since they can change licenses at any moment or use custom ones as this case.

      Is that, and also that main licenses are already listed in GNU and Open Source websites.

  • @TheImpressiveX@lemmy.ml
    2•3 years ago

    Since I’m already here, I have another example.

    So there’s this Mario fangame called Super Mario Bros. X (which was proprietary to begin with), it was abandoned by its developer long ago but the community’s still active. Some fans modded the original game and called it “SMBX2”. Their homepage stated that “SMBX2 is an Open Source expansion” of the original game. Unsurprisingly, there was no source code to be found, anywhere. Not even a GitHub repo or anything.

    This was discussed on a forum post, and people explained that the game used a framework licensed under the GPL. The OP had to explain to them that “A project doesn’t become Open Source just because they are using Open Source things”, which I absolutely agree with. Think of it this way: Microsoft uses BSD-licensed code in Windows, does that make Windows “open source”?

    Sorry for the long post, had to get this out of my system.

    • @Echedenyan@lemmy.mlOP
      2•3 years ago

      Yes, the VPN to which I want to connect is made with OpenVPN and I know about the CLI client but I wanted to search something with GUI to make it a bit simpler as NetworkManager is not integrated with MATE.

        • @Echedenyan@lemmy.mlOP
          2•3 years ago

          I use Wicd by default (sorry for forgotting to mention it) but I didn’t see a way to set VPNs there.

          In the end I just finished using OpenVPN CLI client. I disabled the SysVInit service and start it manually when I want to have VPN connection.

          NetworkManager, in their integrations with GNOME and KDE, has a plugin, for each one, to integrate set up VPNs using also part of OpenVPN main client as backend.

        • Adda
          3•3 years ago

          I believe you meant Mullvad, right? As far as I know, Mullvad should be a really good open-source VPN.

          • @Echedenyan@lemmy.mlOP
            2•3 years ago

            Are you sure Mullvad is FLOSS? Claimings in https://mullvad.net/en/help/open-source/ don’t suggest it directly.

            If you check their repositories seems that a lot of important part are FLOSS even what seems to be part of the server side and all the client side, but given that they don’t guarantee that and the amount of parts they have as repositories, I can think there is a not-showed part that could be non-FLOSS.

            • Adda
              1•3 years ago

              I myself am not sure, to be honest, but a lot of people here seems to be using Mullvad and from what I have been able to find, everyone on Lemmy recommends it. I wasn’t inspecting their repositories closely, but it could be that some parts are not FLOSS. I don’t know though. According to the positive reviews, I tend to believe what Mullvad says and claims, and even though I agree the claim might be a bit indirect (unintentionally or purposely), it seems they are doing a great job. But I sadly cannot confirm nor refute your claim.

                • Adda
                  2•3 years ago

                  I have never heard of Riseup VPN, but I will take a closer look in the future. Looks definitely interesting though I am somewhat concerned about the lack of information about Riseup VPN on the Internet so far. Seems to be recommended enough, but it will take me some time to be persuaded probably.

                • @Lowey@lemmy.ml
                  1•3 years ago

                  Riseup is good enough to be honest. But I have seen mullvad that it’s in F-droid so pretty sure it’s FOSS. Also most security researcher I follow says it’s best not to use VPN, but if I do to use mullvad cause of the audits and clean history