[silviot]

I just clicked on a video link in this thread (so I know nothing about this app), but came here to mention that the fact that Luis Rossman is behind this plays a big role for me. I have a lot of trust in that guy. I think others might share the feeling.

[safety1st]

I've never heard of him and I'm curious to learn more but two big problems. One, it seems his Gitlab instance has received the HN hug of death and couldn't handle it. Two, it seems he is trash talking open source software and using that to justify his own proprietary monopoly software.

Ironically one of the great things about open source licenses is that when a guy can't keep his website online we can fork it and someone more competent can become the maintainer of the project. Of course Louis Rossman wouldn't profit from that.

So from what I am seeing so far I am thinking fuck this guy. The GPL, similar licenses, and user freedom are all way more important than him, whoever he is. Huge negative marks to this guy for attacking free software. We have seen a long string of these exploitative software vendors come and go. He seems to be establishing that he's just another one of the vendors who wants to exploit his users.

[silviot]

> Two, it seems he is trash talking open source software and using that to justify his own proprietary monopoly software.

I'm sorry, but I really don't see this in any possible way. Can you help me understand? What did he say that you consider "trash talking open source software"?

The reason I like him is that he's been fighting Apple anti-repair policies for years.

[safety1st]

I admit it's a hot take because I couldn't actually load the site. However I read this and watched the relevant portion of his video: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37925589

The problem here is that he's attacking the general case of free software licenses - OK I get it that some people downloaded a malicious fork of Newpipe and that sucks. But that's not a reason to abandon free/open/copyleft licensing of software, which is essentially the case he's making. At the end of the day this is a guy who has a large audience and has decided to attack open source licensing. I get that he may be a good guy and do other things that are good but that is a serious problem.

[iopq]

He purposefully doesn't allow forks that add ads to the software, so it's less permissive than most open source licenses. But it does allow you to modify the source code for non-commercial use.

[yreg]

Where did you get these ideas since as you say, you don't know him?