I developed two open-source IPTV players for Windows using Python, each with unique login methods:

•	One player authenticates using a MAC address.
•	The other supports logging in via an M3U Plus URL or through Xtream Codes with a username and password.

You can explore both projects here: https://github.com/Cyogenus

Is software that prohibits the use of proprietary software in free software free?

I wanna avoid predatory journals and blacklisted researchers.

I need this to dub videos to different languages, while keeping the same voice and tone. But it's very expensive.

Is there a free alternative software?

I'm not asking about patent risk here, just if a de-compiled and permissively licensed program could be under the umbrella of Free Software. Notably I've never seen recompiled software licensed under anything but MIT, which I would have to imagine is due to the mentioned potential patent risk.

Hi! We’re Brendan and Michael, the creators of Sourcebot (https://github.com/sourcebot-dev/sourcebot). Sourcebot is an open-source code search tool that allows you to quickly search across many large codebases. Check out our demo video here: https://youtu.be/mrIFYSB_1F4, or try it for yourself here on our demo site: https://demo.sourcebot.dev

While at prior roles, we’ve both felt the pain of searching across hundreds of multi-million line codebases. Using local tools like grep were ill-suited since you often only had a handful of codebases checked out at a time. Sourcegraph solves this issue by indexing a collection of codebases in the background and exposing a web-based search interface. It is the de-facto search solution for medium to large orgs, but is often cited as expensive ($49 per user / month) and recently went closed source. That’s why we built Sourcebot.

We designed Sourcebot to be:

• Easily deployed: we provide a single, self-contained Docker image.
• Fast & scalable: designed to minimize search times (current average is ~73ms) across many large repositories.
• Cross code-host support: we currently support syncing public & private repositories in GitHub and GitLab.
• Quality UI: we like to think that a good looking dev-tool is more pleasant to use.
• Open source: Sourcebot is free to use by anyone.

Under the hood, we use Zoekt as our code search engine, which was originally authored by Han-Wen Nienhuys and now maintained by Sourcegraph. Zoekt works by building a trigram index from the source code enabling extremely fast regular expression matching. Russ Cox has a great article on how trigram indexes work if you’re interested.

In the shorter-term, there are several improvements we want to make, like:

• Improving how we communicate indexing progress (this is currently non-existent so it’s not obvious how long things will take)
• UX improvements like search history, query syntax highlighting & suggestions, etc.
• Small QOL improvements like bookmarking code snippets.
• Support for more code hosts (e.g., BitBucket, SourceForge, ADO, etc.)

In the longer-term, we want to investigate how we could go beyond just traditional code search by leveraging machine learning to enable experiences like semantic code search (“where is system X located?”) and code explanations (”how does system X interact with system Y?”). You could think of this as a copilot being embedded into Sourcebot. Our hunch is that will be useful to devs, especially when packaged with the traditional code search, but let us know what you think.

Give it a try: https://github.com/sourcebot-dev/sourcebot. Cheers!

I am working on a Rust library for robotics. I want projects of any license, including proprietary, to be able to depend on it, but have derivative works keep the same license. This is pretty similar to the LGPL, MPL, and EPL. I think these are usually classified as "weak copyleft." There are a few issues with MPL and LGPL though:

• LGPL bans tivoization, which is a problem for embedded software, like that which runs commonly on robots.
• LGPL does not work well with Rust's static linking for allowing closed-source projects to depend on the library.
• LGPL allows derivative works to "upgrade" the license to the standard GPL and similar licenses but not the other way, meaning that forks can become less free than the original. I want full two-way copyleft meaning that if someone forks my software, I can fork their fork under my original license.
• MPL has an "any subsequent version" clause that is mandatory (unlike LGPL's optional "or any later version") which gives Mozilla the power to relicense my library under any terms they ilke. I don't want this in the wake of the whole GPLv3 fiasco.

I do prefer LGPL's full-work-level copyleft to MPL's file-level copyleft, but that's not a dealbreaker. EPL seems like a good option, but I want to make sure that I didn't miss something important in it, and I haven't read about it as thoroughly as the other two. It seems a bit more obscure than them. Would it be a good choice given these requirements? Thank you!

TLDR:

• Projects of any license, including closed-source ones, must be allowed to depend on the library and statically link it.
• Derivative works of the library must be under the same license. (This does not include projects using the library solely as a dependency and not modifying it.)
• Embedding the library must be allowed without additional legal complications.
• New versions of the license must not automatically apply.

Is EPL a good choice?

Edit: It turns out I didn't really understand copyleft as well as I thought I did. I think BSD 3-clause or a similar permissive license is what I want.

I am working on developing free software for The People's Internet, I would like any ideas that anyone here has for user-facing software that should be made free. I'm generally looking for smaller software suggestions rather than major ones, but anything helps. If your software does get developed or I know of something free that fits your suggestion, I will let you know in a reply. Thanks!

I'm a recent CS grad and I absolutely love FOSS and the general open source free software movement. I'm a bit worried about my own future though. I'm looking for jobs rn, but I do eventually want to get into the free software/open source world.

I'm inclined to the viewpoint that the only just basis for price is actual scarcity & cost.

Resources have a price because they are not infinite, and they take labor to process. Labor is itself a cost, both in terms of time and energy (both of which are naturally scarce) for the laborer.

Much of our world is built on artificial scarcity. Artificial restrictions like patents that artificially restrict the supply of goods for the benefit of the few. I find the idea that COVID vaccines were blocked behind patents where rich countries could afford to get them and poor ones were screwed profoundly unjust and immoral. Not to mention how inefficient it is to artificially paywall things like knowledge that can be freely replicated and spread.

With that said, where does that leave the world of software? Software is not scarce in any real meaning of the term. One of the biggest advantages to digital technology is that files, binaries, code, etc, all of that can be replicated forever entirely for free.

There's basically no cost to hitting ctrl+c and ctrl+v and so software, once created, IS NOT SCARCE.

So, to me, it is immoral, unjust, and inefficient to paywall software that has already been created. All software, once produced, should be free to replicate and use.

But that leaves us with an important question: if you can't charge for software, how exactly do developers get paid? There is a cost associated with PRODUCING software, but not REPLICATING software. And so we can end up with free rider problems and the like with production.

To me, it seems that the thing that is fair to charge for is something that is naturally scarce: Developer time/energy.

So I wanted to ask you guys who actually have experience making money this way: How do you do it? How do you charge for developer time while maintaining a free code base?

Like, do you write a base code base, thereby demonstrating your skill/experience and attracting users, and then charge for customization and/or services to specific clients? Or do you do like contracting work? So the code could be readily accessible to anyone (of course, assuming contracts allow for it) but the specific design/objectives would be set by the client.

In general, what is your approach to monetizing developer time rather than the software itself? What has proven most effective and what do you think about the general idea I'm getting at, the monetization of developer time rather than software itself?

I have a very poor knowledge of political philosophies. The only one I know is the one I live in - social democratic capitalism.

I've started with FOSS long time ago. And, I there are two main points forming my love for this software development philosophy:

• I was a poor kid, and FOSS is also free as in free beer,
• freedom - really love the principles of full self-ownership (individual sovereignty) of users.

I want to extend my knowledge about political philosophies, and I'm starting from free software position, as I love the principles.

And, it seems to me, that free software doesn't particularly thrive in capitalist world (maybe I'm totally wrong about this).