Posted by themez 9/13/2025
I have no idea of the legal implications of all this (I'm not a lawyer), but there has to be some kind of legal thing that prevents the original licensor from being unreasonable in this way, I'd hope?
The license only binds the licensee that received the code under the respective license.
Things get more complicated if there are external contributors that may have contributed under specific legal arrangements, but in the simple case there’s no legal way to force the original copyright owner to publish sources.
I'm saying that if the original licensor (ie. the copyright owner) offers software that they fully own to people under the terms of the GPL, they're binding the licensee (ie. the entity receiving the software) such that further redistribution of the binary that the licensee received has to come with an offer to receive the source code - which is something that the licensee cannot offer if they don't have access to the source code themselves.
I'm arguing that such a situation (ie. the original copyright owner not offering source code, but at the same time saying that the people receiving the software have to offer the source code if they want to redistribute the binary) is unreasonable to the point where it feels like there may be some legal action that could be taken, as at that point the license is asking people to do things that they literally cannot do.
For any small to medium sized projects with zero external contributors, it's highly unlikely that anyone would pursue legal action so the person who owns the project does de facto have this right whether or not it's legal according to the license.
> Things get more complicated if there are external contributors
I don't think this is complicated - unless there's a contributor agreement that people have signed that says otherwise, people have copyright on the code they have contributed so the original creator doesn't have a right to relicense their code.
However, again it comes down to whether anyone would bring a legal fight and the answer is almost certainly no. Forking the code is much more likely at that point.
> whether or not it's legal according to the license
The original author is not bound by any licence. Only the licensees are. The licence they chose to use by definition cannot bind them; they are issuing the licence.
(They are obviously bound by the licences of anything that they use, but that’s not what the person you’re replying to is talking about)
Yes, but this is only true if nobody else ever contributes to the software. Once the project has multiple contributors, each of these people are copyright holders of whatever they contributed, and they are the licensor for their parts of the code. So the original author is also held to the terms of the license for all contributed code.
There's a community edition that's GPL, and it does say they're 'going open source' but clearly it's not the exact same app as the official distribution:
This is the repository for the Chatbox Community Edition, open-sourced under the GPLv3 license.
Chatbox is going open-source Again!
We regularly sync code from the pro repo to this repo, and vice versa.
You'd be surprised, but it was extremely difficult to find an android app that supported API key usage. Ahead of its time.
I couldn't tell you the last time I installed a new app on my phone.
Everything there is mostly out to exploit me, or a direct security liability regardless of what app store.
As a shining bright light of hope, I will list some apps I have installed which do not appear to me to fall into those buckets.
1. Anki - Flash cards app, I can memorize stuff. It's really good.
2. KDE Connect - Zero exploitation, open source, even sorta works
3. Peakfinder - So far this app has seemed okay. "I programmed PeakFinder during the day and danced Tango during the night" - Peakfinder's creator
Also, about 70% of the apps on F-Droid https://f-droid.org/ are fine. This is what I miss most about android.
I do think that by percentage more of the iOS apps are exploitative crap or full of ads, probably because you need to pay $100/year for the app to keep existing at all.
One of tricks to get fewer exploitative apps is to avoid iPhone and never install anything that needs google play services.
Also, delete any app that has an ad instantly unless it's really important.
oh don't worry, Google is trying to kill that too. you won't have to miss Android soon. https://developer.android.com/developer-verification discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45017028
Wait, what's wrong with the other 30%?
There's also games and blockchain apps which are bad for the soul
You do get to pick the videos, and have none imposed to you (through ads), so unless you're saying the entire video medium is awful for the soul, I'm thinking one could pick content that they find "good" for their soul?
Users want apps and it’s important not to assume that the majority of users will think like HN users. Even if your app is mostly just a webview wrapping your website, being in the App Store matters.