this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2023
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Grayjay is not open-source. It's source-available. That still means your comment is true in principle, but don't expect to be able to share your changes with anyone.
So, why can't you say "source-available” or "basically open-source"? For a few weeks, I genuinely thought Grayjay was open-source, because of misinformation that you and others are spreading. It was mere chance that I looked into their LICENSE file, because I was curious to see what open-source license they're using, only to see that they're not.
I'm a software developer, so my interpretation of "open-source" needs to be extremely precise. Open-source has tons of legal implications. Their FUTO TEMPORARY LICENSE breaks some of those implications, which is fine by itself, but if you use the one word in the English language with a clear definition for it, then you're effectively lying to anyone who uses that precise definition.
I am talking about the official definition: https://opensource.org/osd/
The publication of that definition is what caused us to use the word "open-source" in our vocabulary. And the first sentence in that definition is "Open source doesn’t just mean access to the source code.".
When I talk to our legal team at work and tell them that a library is open-source, I'm effectively saying to them that there's no legal restrictions on us using that.
Mere access to the source code does not offer that. You could be granted access to the source code and not even be allowed to modify it, as you suggested to OP.
As far as I can tell, this is the case for Grayjay. So, yes, OP can modify it, assuming they don't get caught doing so.
Less self-explanatory than "source-available", because of that official definition.