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Hoshino Lina (星乃リナ) 🩵 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!!
Hoshino Lina (星乃リナ) 🩵 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!!
@lina@vt.social  ·  activity timestamp 4 hours ago

Fluxer keeps coming up as a Discord alternative. It looks good, but it has one major problem: It's AGPL and it requires a CLA.

That is an enshittification time bomb. I personally will not contribute to projects using that combination, it's gone wrong way too many times.

That's not to say it's bad to use as a hosted service, it being open source at all is better than Discord.

But from an open source point of view, it's not a good licensing setup. It basically creates a system where the project owners have more rights than other contributors. It's not fair.

Edit: For ref, this is the formal CLA:

https://cla-assistant.io/fluxerapp/fluxer

TL;DR "We can do whatever we want with your code, and license it under any license".

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Lars Marowsky-Brée 😷
Lars Marowsky-Brée 😷
@larsmb@mastodon.online replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 hours ago

@lina The AGPL is not the problem there though; the CLA to a for-profit org is.

(Though the AGPL was likely chosen to scare other potential exploiters away, AGPL has no impact on community users except the FUD.)

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keyshooter :revblobfoxgooglymlem: :bocchi_anxious:
keyshooter :revblobfoxgooglymlem: :bocchi_anxious:
@keyshooter@akko.wtf replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 hours ago
@lina miss lina, as someone who has a hard time understanding licensing hell, what would you consider it would have been a better license? GPL3? MIT? Apache? I ask seriously acat_blink
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Hoshino Lina (星乃リナ) 🩵 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!!
Hoshino Lina (星乃リナ) 🩵 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!!
@lina@vt.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 1 hour ago

@keyshooter That depends, but the bigger issue here is the CLA...

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Maddy
Maddy
@maddyunderstars@aus.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 4 hours ago

@lina I'm using the AGPL for my own project, without the CLA though. I'd like to know more about your opinions regarding that?

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Hoshino Lina (星乃リナ) 🩵 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!!
Hoshino Lina (星乃リナ) 🩵 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!!
@lina@vt.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 4 hours ago

@maddyunderstars I personally don't think the AGPL is a good license (it's very widely misunderstood and doesn't work how most people think), but that ship has kinda sailed with how popular it's become lately so... pick your poison I guess.

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Hoshino Lina (星乃リナ) 🩵 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!!
Hoshino Lina (星乃リナ) 🩵 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!!
@lina@vt.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 4 hours ago

Essentially, you should consider any AGPL+CLA project as "source available", not as a true open source project where everyone's contributions are equal.

Of course, at least it's possible to fork since the base license is AGPL.

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Techokami
Techokami
@techokami@woof.tech replied  ·  activity timestamp 1 hour ago

@lina The CLA viewer is broken for me for some reason, but I did find their justification in the contributing document in the repo: it's dual-licensed! Apparently they offer a commercial license for people that can't/won't honor the AGPLv3, and the CLA is to allow contributions to be used in this version as well. This sounds... similar to how Qt works, IMHO. I'll need to read the actual CLA later when I get home, though.

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Didek
Didek
@didek@101010.pl replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 hours ago

@lina

No CLA is better than CLA, but this is still a free, libre and open source software by any definition. Open source does not always mean build in collaboration or even accepting community changes.

True it may be not in the spirit or something to even avoid, but a FOSS software it is.

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Hoshino Lina (星乃リナ) 🩵 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!!
Hoshino Lina (星乃リナ) 🩵 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!!
@lina@vt.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 hours ago

@didek Fair. The point I'm trying to make is, it's not an open contribution FOSS project. It's more like source drops with an option to donate your time to them for nothing in return.

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knack
knack
@knack@aus.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 4 hours ago

@lina addendum: "regardless of license, anything maintained by an org which has taken VC funding will end poorly".

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Juanjo Salvador
Juanjo Salvador
@jsalvador@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 4 hours ago

@lina I'll be keeping an eye on it, just in case... but as plain users alternative seems promising.

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RND
RND
@nullexistent@mstdn.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 4 hours ago

@lina yupp - sadly stoat is in the same corner blobfoxsad

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