I’ve been using Invidious and NewPipe to watch YouTube for a long time. I don’t use an account with either of these. However, I’m wanting to get recommendations based on what I watch and my subscriptions. LibreTube looked promising but it no longer works. When I try to watch videos it won’t play. YouTube Vanced is dead. Not sure if another viable solution exists.
Yeah, let’s see what the FUTO guys come up with. AFAIK they’re still struggling with licensing, getting an issue tracker running and quite some basic stuff. And I think YouTube won’t like what they’re doing. But I like that someone tries.
They have a lot of money for legal battles
They’re not struggling with anything. They opened a GitHub page for issue tracking and the license was figured out a long time ago.
Rly? Last time I checked most of their projects had a temporary license and Louis said they needed to figure out how to prevent something like with NewPipe from happening. Did they find a final license in the meantime?
Do they read the Github? All I see is people not understanding the source is somewhere else and saying xy isn’t open source. And I don’t see anyone from FUTO intervening or posting. It’s mainly the community amongst themselves in the issues… Or did I miss something?
It’s worth noting, of course, that those illicit forks of NewPipe also violate their license. If dishonest proprietary software developers don’t care about NewPipe’s license why would they care about FUTO’s? If they really want to stop forks they can simply make their product source-unavailable, but then they don’t get to claim to be “open source” or “open source adjacent.”
The problem is not so much that the are forks (remember, in the free software world, forks are explicitly allowed) but that these forks use the branding of the original project and thus damage the original project’s reputation. There is a tool for dealing with counterfeits - trademark - and it is a tool used by reputable free software organizations such as Mozilla and Debian. Now imagine if those free software projects adopted FUTO’s hostility to forks - it would be a net loss to the free software community. Don’t let organizations like FUTO sell you the idea that you don’t need the freedom to fork.
Of course, even proprietary products can be counterfeited, and trademark helps stop those too.