this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2024
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Why is flathub saying Floorp is proprietary (lemdro.id)
submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I am very new to linux and all the open source stuff (my first post on lemmy actually) so I don't get how this stuff works but flathub is saying that floorp is proprietary. But after a quick google search it says that floorp is open source licensed under MPL 2.0

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[–] [email protected] 115 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)

It used to be open source, but large parts of it have been relicensed under their proprietary source-available shared source license. The reason why it isn't entirely proprietary is that it's based on Firefox, which is entirely licensed under the MPL. The weak copyleft of the MPL states that all parts lifted from Firefox must remain open source, but the new parts can be proprietary.

Source-available licenses are a type of proprietary license where the code is made public for people to look at, but you're not actually allowed to use it. Users can still contribute upstream, so they're usually parasitic licenses aimed at getting free labour out of the userbase without actually giving back any code to the commons, all while keeping up the illusion of being open source. It sucks.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 4 months ago

Huh! I didn't know about all these happenings around floorp's source code availability, but from what I can see now it should be back as fully open source under the MPL 2.0... am I wrong?

License on official GitHub

Reddit post about coming back fully open source

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

without actually giving back any code to the commons

Can you explain how this works?

Say a contributer downloads v1.1 of floorp, checks the code and makes a PR. Floop sees this and accepts the change and publishes v1.2. If a new contributer downloads floorp, they get v1.2 where they can see the previous merged PR.

How is it that they are not giving back? I can understand that not being on a repository makes it difficult but it's technically possible.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 4 months ago (1 children)

The contribution is automatically relicensed under that licence and as such, it remains property of the org that made floorp, so they're technically getting free labour, support and maintenance

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Sounds like bsd with extra steps

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago

It's way worse.

With bsd you could at least take the code you got and make your own fork, with these shared source licenses you get nothing.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Now said contributor works a bit more on the project and adds some great new functionality, but floorp don't agree it fits their plans. So the contributor decides to make their own fork called ceilingp and build from that. Nope, they don't have the license to do so. They can take the mpl parts. They can take their own parts (they didn't sign an exclusive release of their code). They can add their own new code. They can't use the rest of the floorp code though.

So floorp gets the benefits but no one else can build off it without permission (save for private use without releasing it and potentially having others do the same).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Thanks for the explanation!

They can take their own parts (they didn’t sign an exclusive release of their code).

From this I understand that their attitude is "you can look at our entire code but don't try making something out of it. But you are welcome to help us :)"