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Cake day: November 28th, 2023

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  • Dunno. Regardless of the method used by the extension, I think any extension called “Bypass Paywalls” that does what it says on the tin can pretty unambiguously be said to be designed to circumvent “technological protection measures”. In this case, it circumvents the need to login entirely and obviously it circumvents the paywall.

    Though as you said, these guys should probably be sending DMCAs to the Internet Archive if they actually want to stop their paywalls from being bypassed. I know they do honor takedown requests. Maybe archive.today is the problem? Maybe they don’t honor DMCA requests. I very often see them used on Hacker News whenever someone wants share a paywall-free link to an article.


  • You can do that with permissively licensed software too. Except with those, the party distributing their repackaged version doesn’t have to distribute source code alongside it. A lot of companies avoid copyleft software because they don’t want to or cannot deal with stricter licensing terms. If you’re a company creating commercial software which you intend to sell, you don’t want to use any GPL code, because you want to keep your software closed source to avoid exactly what you described from happening.

    This can be exploited by primarily licensing your open source code using strong copyleft (like the AGPLv3) while selling commercial licenses to businesses that don’t want to comply with the AGPL and are willing to pay up. Qt is able to successfully use this even with weaker copyleft (LGPLv3) because it’s used a lot in embedded systems (like smart cars) which cannot comply with the LGPLv3’s anti-tivoization clause.

    This means copyleft licenses can make it easier to profit if you’re the author of the code, but of course third parties can more easily profit from permissive licenses.




  • leopold@lemmy.kde.socialtoOpen Source@lemmy.mlWhy is flathub saying Floorp is proprietary
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    2 months ago

    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.






  • I would consider the “source code” for artwork to be the project file, with all of the layers intact and whatnot. The Photoshop PSD, the GIMP XCF or the Krita KRA. The “compiled” version would be the exported PNG/JPG.

    You can license a compiled binary under CC BY if you want. That would allow users to freely decompile/disassemble it or to bundle the binary for their purposes, but it’s different from releasing source code. It’s closed source, but under a free license.