I’d say “sort of.” Lemmy as a software is under a classic benevolent dictator situation. It’s open source but as long as the lead devs remain two people we are kind of at their whim. Yeah someone could fork it but it’s the same issue of you’re now at the whim of that person keeping their fork up to date and what they want to do. Until they kind of allow more people having a say on the main repo it’s up in the air what happens truly.
We’ve seen this same situation with Emby to Jellyfin. Where the open source project gets so good it goes close source, becomes a company and leaves everyone scrambling to get people to help work on the last bit of open source code. Meanwhile Emby just used their huge install base to upsell people. Jellyfin is still trying to get full parity with Emby despite Jellyfin having thousands of contributors and being open source. It’s hard to keep up with well funded innovation compared to volunteer work.
I jumped ship from Emby to Jellyfin a long time ago. Just looked at their site now: “Purchase Emby Premiere and receive additional bonus features such as Cover Art, Mobile Sync, Cloud Sync, and free Android apps.” Pretty sure you get all that in Jellyfin already.
To put a finer point on it, that’s precisely why it’s important for Free Software to be copyleft rather than merely permissively-licensed. (And for it to either have a trustworthy copyright holder, like the Free Software Foundation or similar non-profit, or to have too many copyright holders to make changing the license tractable.)
Exactly. They would have to rewrite all the code in order to make it proprietary. AGPL license ensures that not even an instance owner can (legally) change the code of their own instance without releasing the modified source code.
We need to make sure that any apps that are created for Lemmy, also have a Copyleft license. At the very least they should be Free Software (which doesn’t seem to be guaranteed sadly, since most people don’t know what that means).
“Created for Lemmy” isn’t really a thing, all you need is to implement the ActivityPub protocol. Whether or not it has any relationship to Lemmy has no bearing on if it can talk to instances using Lemmy’s implementation.
There is no dictator. The developers don’t have any control over people’s instances. They have very little power. We are the ones that have all the power since Lemmy is decentralized and Free Software.
On Reddit the users have way less power, but more than they realize. They can’t create their own instance of Reddit, but they can leave the platform entirely (and probably overwrite all their content with gibberish), which would probably kill the company.
I’d say “sort of.” Lemmy as a software is under a classic benevolent dictator situation. It’s open source but as long as the lead devs remain two people we are kind of at their whim. Yeah someone could fork it but it’s the same issue of you’re now at the whim of that person keeping their fork up to date and what they want to do. Until they kind of allow more people having a say on the main repo it’s up in the air what happens truly.
We’ve seen this same situation with Emby to Jellyfin. Where the open source project gets so good it goes close source, becomes a company and leaves everyone scrambling to get people to help work on the last bit of open source code. Meanwhile Emby just used their huge install base to upsell people. Jellyfin is still trying to get full parity with Emby despite Jellyfin having thousands of contributors and being open source. It’s hard to keep up with well funded innovation compared to volunteer work.
Sure but anyone can implement something using the activityPub spec and federate with other instances regardless of what flavor they’re using.
I jumped ship from Emby to Jellyfin a long time ago. Just looked at their site now: “Purchase Emby Premiere and receive additional bonus features such as Cover Art, Mobile Sync, Cloud Sync, and free Android apps.” Pretty sure you get all that in Jellyfin already.
That’s what the GPL is for: preserve freedom of the users.
To put a finer point on it, that’s precisely why it’s important for Free Software to be copyleft rather than merely permissively-licensed. (And for it to either have a trustworthy copyright holder, like the Free Software Foundation or similar non-profit, or to have too many copyright holders to make changing the license tractable.)
Exactly. They would have to rewrite all the code in order to make it proprietary. AGPL license ensures that not even an instance owner can (legally) change the code of their own instance without releasing the modified source code.
We need to make sure that any apps that are created for Lemmy, also have a Copyleft license. At the very least they should be Free Software (which doesn’t seem to be guaranteed sadly, since most people don’t know what that means).
“Created for Lemmy” isn’t really a thing, all you need is to implement the ActivityPub protocol. Whether or not it has any relationship to Lemmy has no bearing on if it can talk to instances using Lemmy’s implementation.
There is no dictator. The developers don’t have any control over people’s instances. They have very little power. We are the ones that have all the power since Lemmy is decentralized and Free Software.
On Reddit the users have way less power, but more than they realize. They can’t create their own instance of Reddit, but they can leave the platform entirely (and probably overwrite all their content with gibberish), which would probably kill the company.
Benevolent dictator is a software development term, that’s why it’s italicized. It’s not literal
honestly the internet should be nationalized its the only way to ensure fair competition