What is Grayjay?
Grayjay is a cutting-edge app that serves as a video player and source aggregator. It allows you to stream and organize videos from various sources, providing a unified platform for your entertainment needs.
It’s mostly used as a YouTube frontend^. However, it is now launching as a desktop app for Linux, Mac and Windows.
I really wish there was a truly open source version of GrayJay because GrayJay is actually Not OpenSource
Yikes. I’ll be sticking with NewPipe and other FOSS apps.
It is open source, just not free open source
It’s proprietary
Typically licenses not OSI approved are referred to as “Source available” rather than “Open source”. This is one reason FUTO (who make Grayjay) refer to their license as “Source first” and not “Open Source” (though they did call it that for a while before clarifying and switching to the new term).
And by “clarifying” you mean “dunking on Open Source and parading around like the saviors of the human race for inventing Open-Source-except-with-donation-nags-to-fund-their-fully-for-profit-business.” Good job, guys, you’ve solved enshittification (/s).
Haha yeah I do find the licence a bit weird. Kind of a non-commercial licence but there are definitely some parts that I don’t quite get.
I have seen Eron Wolf talking a bit about what he is trying to do. I get his frustrations, but am not convinced their licence helps with those at all. You can’t really take open source, take away some freedoms that are sometimes taken advantage of, and pretend that removing those freedoms didn’t remove the benefits that are the reason those freedoms existed in the first place.
But they do provide a good alternative for watching videos on multiple platforms without ads, without subscriptions or anything. And the app works if you don’t pay as well. Just because they ask money for their hard work while at the same time allowing the community to work with it sounds all good to me. It’s just not completely open source and completely free. But feel free to make a non-profit true open source counterpart if you like :)
One of the goals of source first licenses is to stop enshittification since it doesn’t allow paid clones
Not saying I agree with their policy, but I would hope more for-profit businesses make their source code available