To be frank, you appear to be set on pre-punishing a solo developer for sharing a family-and-friends project based on a rather cursory examination. Doesn’t that run somewhat contrary to the spirit of FOSS?

“The spirit of FOSS” entails the users having the four freedoms (to use, modify, share verbatim copies, and share modified copies) of the source code. You’ve suggested that this project is primarily binary-only with only intermittent source code dumps, meaning that until these binaries have corresponding source code they are neither FOSS in letter nor in spirit, and thus inappropriate for this community as well as for !aials@lemmy.ml, which is for AI-assisted FOSS. Given that you’ve suggested you will only provide source code for “major revisions” this suggests that “minor versions” never will be FOSS. Effectively you’re promoting a proprietary product here that may or may not have intermittent source code snapshots.

Furthermore, the fact that you seem to consider it a great effort to “sanitize” the source code for public release suggests that what is being shared with the public is not in fact the corresponding source code to the binaries you upload.

As you pointed out the MIT license does allow you to make proprietary derivatives, so nothing you’ve done is “wrong” or illegal. That doesn’t make it not proprietary.

Edit: I’m a different person than the admin who removed your post. I’m not suggesting your project is slop or that the effort you’ve put into it is inconsequential. I’m just saying that binaries without source code are not FOSS even if you publish occasional snapshots of selected releases. I’d probably be more favorable to this approach if there were FOSS builds from the source code snapshots, or maybe if only the FOSS releases were on github and the proprietary ones somewhere else - but that’s probably asking a bit too much.

It’s proprietary so it was always bad. The degooglers just realized it when it bit them in the ass, but before then they were promoting it all over the FOSS/degoogle community as one of the good proprietary apps.

This raises another question I’ve been kicking around in my head for a while - at what point does a slop project stop being slop? Say I one shot a slop app and then continue to iterate on it with human-written commits. Or I find a vibe coded app I think has potential, fork it and then iterate on it. At what point does this become non-slop, or does it ever?

You raise a good point. “Build” in software engineering has a very specific meaning: typically binary artifacts are “built” from source code. Source code I think is typically “written” but of course if you’re using a generative program you can’t say you wrote it…

I’ve seen an LLM-user claim that “AI is the compiler of natural language” so I suppose if the prompt is source code then the generated code could be considered a build artifact. But, yeah, I don’t think people generally say they “build” code.

Proprietary is a deal breaker (and SaaSS is a subset of that), so if the only option is slop then I guess I have to use slop.

But, realistically, neither. I haven’t found a situation so far in which the only viable option is vibe coded.

Rewriting stuff in rust was kind of a meme long before LLM’s. Rust also is famously a powerful language with a steep learning curve, the latter being irrelevant if you don’t actually have to bother to learn it.

My tinfoil conspiracy theory is that artcraft is actually a 5d chess move from the “anti-ai” camp to draw bigtech attention and get them to turn against LLMs on principle, or at least get them to implement some sort of anti-app-cloning thing like anthropic recently did for games.

Not really but that’d be funny i suppose.

I wonder how the rustaceans feel about their language being associated with slop.

That is if you believe “intellectual property” to be an ethical concept in the first place. Many in the free software movement do not. Many of us also do not believe copying, sharing, or remixing is “theft.” That is a propaganda term from the copyright cartel.

(Note that I think so-called generative AI has many problems but this is not one that concerns the free software movement imho)

The biggest problem with patched apps is that they are not free software. The patches themselves might be under a free license but applying a free patch to a proprietary program doesn’t cause the entire program to become free.

However, these patched youtube apps are usually promoted as competition to actual free options such as NewPipe, in free software and open source communities. So they serve as attempts to pull FOSS users back into the proprietary world. On that basis I am generally against them and promote real FOSS where possible. NewPipe and its forks (not sure about other FOSS youtube options) also have the benefit of serving as PeerTube clients, so they can be helpful in moving off the youtube platform itself.

Fortunately it also has a fairly sensible non-free software policy

The only non-free software permitted in AlpineBSD is the netbsd-firmware package, which contains binary blobs for NetBSD drivers.

(Although part of me feels like reverse-engineering binary blobs might in fact be a valid use case for LLM’s)

Braxman is apparently considered sus but I’m interested in this if only for the keyboard.

That said this landing page could be better.

“claude make a webpage about our degoogled android operating system that has no google and runs apps without google. make sure to mention that our degoogled os doesn’t have google. make no mistakes.”

Grayjay is source-available proprietary software. https://isitreallyfoss.com/projects/grayjay/

Their replacement for gboard is another proprietary app. A real FOSS alternative that seems popular is Heliboard, but it requires a proprietary blob for swipe typing (although apparently they are working on replacing that with a free alternative). I’m fond of Unexpected Keyboard.

You are correct that simply saying “this is open source” without specifying a license is generally not enough to actually ensure the four freedoms, however in the case of TempleOS Terry Davis specifically wrote on his website that it is public domain (the link is to an archive, to demonstrate that it was not added after his death, but it’s still there).

The public domain is a concept in copyright law where a work has no copyright holder, either because the copyright expired or because (in TempleOS’s case) the copyright was voluntarily relinquished. However, note that it’s entirely jurisdiction-dependent (for example, it’s not always even possible to relinquish a copyright, and copyright expiration also varies by jurisdiction). As copyright is a state-granted monopoly on distribution rights, if no one has that monopoly, there are no restrictions on copying and hence the freedom to modify and distribute the source code is available to all. Note that copyright is automatic upon the creation of a work and does not need to be registered, so either an explicit declaration from the author or knowledge that the copyright term is expired is needed to know something is in the public domain.

In short, if something is in the public domain (as the preferred form for modification i.e. source code) it is free software and open source, but the idea that public domain is somehow incompatible with FOSS is a somewhat reoccurring talking point that came up very recently. I don’t know where this came from but I imagine it has something to do with the discourse on copyright on LLM generated work.

However, it’s usually best to use an explicit license so you can affirm your intent to release the software as free.

FSF recognizes public domain as a category of free software (although, in their pedantry, they are quick to point out that it is not a “license”):

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#PublicDomain

OSI says more or less the same thing although they also elaborate on the actual legal complications of the public domain, and recommend explicitly using a license if possible:

https://opensource.org/faq#public-domain

TBF he’s correct on that one, Linux actually is just the kernel and the OS normally built around it is the project he started ~7 years before Linux was ever a thing. Given his OS project had a political/ethical message that Linux completely disregards, it’s completely understandable he might be a tad irked that his work is lumped in under the kernel guy’s.

Even if it sounds silly to us “normal users” if you put yourself in his head it makes sense.

I like Unexpected Keyboard, it’s really intuitive once you get the hang of the swipe motions. I used to use Anysoft Keyboard but it became unusable with one of the more recent updates so I had to look for a new keyboard and found this one to my liking.

It’s not open source. The open source definition is about more than being able to see source code. The usual term for the latter is “source-available” which tells you nothing about what you’re actually able to do with it.

Another term I use is “proprietary source available software” (PSAS) as a mirror to “free, open source software” (FOSS). Note that the “free” in that term refers to free software (libre) not free-of-cost (gratis). The free software definition and open source definition generally overlap so most licenses that are one will also be the other. In other words, “open source but not FOSS” is not a thing (and is generally a misnomer for PSAS).

As an analogy, you wouldn’t say a store is “open” just because you can look in the windows and see things.

From my perspective “slopcode/vibecode” means entirely (or mostly) generated, which is different than a human-maintained project that includes bits of generated code. As a rule I’m very skeptical of the former and give the benefit of the doubt to the latter especially if it’s an established project.

I’d be fine with removal or mandatory disclosure, but the latter would probably be easier to implement if there was a way to filter them out.