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
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.
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
Sounds like bsd with extra steps
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.
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).
Thanks for the explanation!
From this I understand, 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 :)”