viraptor
11 hours ago
Cool that they did that, but they could also start behaving properly. The app labels itself at GPL licensed, but the most recent releases are not available on GitHub. It's been the situation for quite a while now and it's been raised with the author a few times in the issues. They don't seem to care.
47282847
5 hours ago
Small nitpick: GPL requires to provide a source copy on request. It does not require the author to make it public. Also, original authors can dual license, so the GPL would only apply to users, not them, and they are free to change license for versions at any point in time.
Kudos
5 hours ago
Unless they have GPL dependencies I'm not sure they have to release source for a binary release. If I write some code and grant you a license to use it under the GPL, I would have thought I still am the copyright holder and don't need any kind of license to do whatever I want with it.
Sophira
3 hours ago
My understanding is that the GPL specifies that any further redistribution of binary code (by the licensee) has to come with an offer to be able to receive the source code, which they can then modify and redistribute under the original license. If the original licensor doesn't actually allow access to the source code, there's no way for that to happen and I'd argue that the licensor is being unreasonable by asking licensees to comply with something they have no chance of being able to comply with. (Short of decompilation, which wouldn't yield the original source code.)
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?
Xylakant
3 hours ago
The license does not bind the original copyright owner, who can do anything with the code - fee example relicense and distribute under another license.
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.
esperent
3 hours ago
> The license does not bind the original copyright owner, who can do anything with the code
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.
Blahah
4 hours ago
The app doesn't label itself as GPL licensed... The terms of the installed Android app are clear that it's closed source [0].
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.
woadwarrior01
4 hours ago
It looks like they have a GPL licensed "community edition" and a closed $19.99/month commercial edition. I supposed the GPL licensed version's raison d'etre is marketing, since non-technical users cannot tell the difference between the two.