 Today, I want to clear up some of the confusion surrounding certain topics related to various free and open source projects out there because here lately on some of my videos, I've noticed that a lot of people are really confused about certain things. I noticed this the other day on my Haiti tea video where the thumbnail here talks about I don't cover Chrome OS because I don't cover things like Chrome OS and Vivaldi and Microsoft Edge and things like that because they're proprietary software. And when I mentioned this, I got many comments on that video telling me Chrome OS is in fact free and open source software and so is Google Chrome and so is Microsoft Edge and so is the Vivaldi browser and many, many other things that are in fact proprietary software. And I understand why some of this is confusing. I'm going to get to why certain people are led astray on these topics and we're going to actually set some of the facts straight on that here in just a second. Another video where it seemed like a lot of people were really confused. My video about Odyssey, Odyssey as a YouTube alternative and I had several people in the comments section of that video tell me that Odyssey is no different than YouTube because in fact Google owns both YouTube and Odyssey and that's actually not true. I will actually demonstrate that that is in fact not true. I understand why people are confused about this as well. So today again I just wanted to cover some of these topics and I'm going to pull up my web browser and we're going to do some quick Google searches and we're going to verify that in fact a lot of these myths are in fact myths. Now one thing I wanted to briefly touch on with free and open source software versus proprietary. I'm like Haiti the other day I mentioned that there's no middle ground. Something is either free and open source software or it's proprietary and that's absolutely true. A lot of people seem to be confused about that statement because they're like hey DT you've got free and open source software on your computer but you also said you have proprietary video drivers Wi-Fi drivers things like that like you have to use some proprietary software but you said there's no middle ground. I mean in the licensing of a piece of software there is no middle ground. You either are free and open source or you're not. There's no there's no in between. So if something has any proprietary miss to it any proprietary stuff added to it at all then it is proprietary software. It cannot license itself under a free license like the MIT, BSD, GPL, Apache license, the Mozilla license. You know you can't use those license if there's any proprietary stuff going on with your piece of software. So it's either 100% open source free and open source or it's proprietary right. If there's 0.01% of proprietoriness to a piece of software right then it is in fact proprietary software. Again there's no middle ground. It's either free and open source or it's proprietary and that's just that's not me making this up. There are definitions describing what free software is and what open source software is and again there's just no middle ground here and you can verify this quickly as far as what a license of a piece of software is if you just use a Google search. Just pull up Google and do name a program license and typically it will tell you what something is licensed under. For example let me pull up my browser here and I'm just going to just try this out. Firefox license. Oh the very first search result. Mozilla public license right that's what Mozilla uses to license all of its software like Firefox and that is a free license so that's very easy to verify right. Now what if I wanted to check the license on Windows 11 now I'm probably going to get information about license keys and things like that so I don't get like something obvious answered here but what I could do is do Windows 11 Wikipedia if I could spill Wikipedia right and just go to the if it's a big piece of software go to their Wikipedia page and Wikipedia always gives you the licensing information and you can see source model it's closed source so right there is proprietary software and I hover over what closed source means and it tells me proprietary software also known as non-free software or closed source software so there's no question right that you know Windows is closed source software of course nobody had questions about Windows but sometimes you try to do a search on some things and it's not so obvious so one of the ones that's kind of confusing Google Chrome and then various things based off of Google Chrome various browsers based off of Google Chrome like Vivaldi Microsoft Edge or the Chrome OS operating system which is browser based based off of Google Chrome and a lot of people are like all of that stuff's open source because Google Chrome is open source no if you type in Google Google Chrome license it is freeware now freeware is not to be confused with free software right freeware is in fact a type of proprietary software it's called freeware because it's free as in free of cost but it doesn't necessarily meet the definitions of free software or open source software they don't make the source code available typically for freeware that they don't allow you to modify it and redistribute and get all the freedoms associated with free open source software freeware just means it's proprietary software but you don't have to pay for it essentially now one of the really confusing ones is Vivaldi if I type Vivaldi browser license in Google you know typically you'll get an answer when you ask Google name a program license it'll spit out GPL or MIT or sometimes it'll actually say proprietary software and in this case it spits out BSD license so naturally a lot of people are legitimately confused here that Vivaldi is in fact a license under a free license the BSD license so it is in fact free and open source software but if you go to this webpage on Vivaldi's website you have to dig a little deeper Vivaldi actually tries to trick people into thinking it's free and open source software it's very shady it's a really scummy tactic and I think more people need to call out the team behind Vivaldi on this because they are legitimately trying to scam people they're trying to trick people and they're just dishonest because when they say Vivaldi is licensed under the BSD license Vivaldi the engine of Vivaldi is the Chromium web engine which is in fact open source software Chromium is licensed under the BSD license the Chromium web engine is licensed under the BSD license but the complete browser on top of that engine the UI and everything that Vivaldi adds to that Vivaldi adds its own proprietary license to that and again either something is open source or it's proprietary there's no middle ground and what Vivaldi does even further to confuse people is this statement here it says in addition our UI code is written in plain accessible code for those who read HTML CSS and JavaScript this means that for all practical purposes the Vivaldi source code is available for audit now that's tricky right there right because they did not say Vivaldi is open source they said Vivaldi the source code everything is out there for you to look at you can go look at the source code that means that the source code is available that's what the free and open source community typically calls source available now source available is not open source for something to be open source it also has to allow you to modify the code redistribute the code right it's gonna be licensed under the one of the big free licenses that guarantees you certain freedoms Vivaldi doesn't do any of that Vivaldi is in fact a proprietary license it has a terms of conditions and an end user license agreement and none of it is BSD or GPL or any other free license you've ever seen but they're tricky here because they're like well we're kind of open source because we're our web engine is based off of Chromium which is open source and our UI we make the source code available but you can be proprietary software and make the source code available that is not what open source means open source does not mean just make the source code available it's a much deeper definition than that if you actually go to the open source initiative website let me pull up my browser again on the open source initiatives website they actually have the official definition of what open source means what that term means what something has to meet to be qualified as open source there are 10 criteria a piece of software must meet for it to be legitimately and legally called open source only one of those 10 criteria is making the source code available so again what Vivaldi is stating on their website and they're they're smart they don't actually come out and say is that Vivaldi is open source they ask this question and then when they answer it they don't actually answer it they never state yes Vivaldi is open source if Vivaldi was open source this would be one sentence is Vivaldi open source it would be yes Vivaldi is open source but they give this roundabout answer without ever really answering it and it's it's confusing to people that don't know better I understand why it's confusing but in fact Vivaldi is proprietary software the people that wrote this garbage here on their website should be ashamed of themselves and you people that actually use Vivaldi and like it I'm sure it's a fine product you need to actually call the Vivaldi team out on this kind of shenanigans and actually make them either change the wording on their website and actually admit that they're proprietary software or actually open source their software properly and license it as it should be under one of the big free licenses and I'm not going to go into Microsoft Edge Microsoft Edge is licensed under a proprietary license just Google it like it'll come up it's proprietary software it's based off the open source Chromium engine but Microsoft doesn't try to lie and claim its open source right Microsoft admits yes Edge is licensed under a proprietary license one of the more confusing ones is Microsoft's VS Code because VS Code technically is open source if you do a Google search VS Code license you'll get a link to their GitHub where the license for VS Code is actually the MIT license one of the free licenses so it's definitely free and open source software here's the tricky part with Microsoft and VS Code though most people that install VS Code get an official binary from Microsoft themselves Microsoft packages the binary especially on windows but they also make binaries for Mac and Linux and those official binaries that Microsoft packages which 99.9% of the people that run VS Code actually use the official binaries right and those binaries are actually re-licensed under a proprietary license the source code is out there you know it is free and open source software VS Code you can go find all the code for VS Code on GitHub and you're free to do whatever the hell you want to do with it you can compile VS Code yourself if you have the skills but that's not what most people do most people go and get the binary from Microsoft and Microsoft then changes it from free and open source software to proprietary software which they're allowed to do because the MIT license actually allows you to take something and then re-license it under a proprietary license if you want to this is something that the GPL license doesn't allow which is one of the reasons I'm a big fan of the GPL but unfortunately the MIT license the BST license the Apache license they're much more permissive and allow companies to play these kinds of games we should also clear up some of the meaning behind the terms free software and open source because a lot of people seemed really confused by this because I see people that make weird claims like Richard Stahlman obviously founded what is known as the free software movement he's the one that basically created the phrase free software and when I say that people immediately reject that it's like free software that's just two really common terms that probably been in use decades before Richard Stahlman ever uttered these words so Richard Stahlman clearly didn't invent free software well yeah he did free software in its current definition and by current definition I mean as defined by the free software foundation for a piece of free software to be considered free software it has to meet four criteria it has to meet these four essential freedoms here and that is what Richard Stahlman means when he uses free software and that's what everybody in the free and open source community means when they talk about free software yes did people before Richard Stahlman talk about free software yes they talked about software that was free of charge that free software is not the free software we're talking about today so yes Richard Stahlman is in fact the founder of the free software movement another one that I sometimes people come back at me because I mentioned this on a video the other day it might have been that hey dt episode about Chrome OS and I talked about what is open source and I said open source kind of really got at start with Linus Torvalds and Eric Raymond especially coming up with that term as it's known today as what open source software is today and some people like to come back at me about that because open source that term has been around for decades before Eric Raymond and Linus Torvalds and all of that and that is true but like the free software definition when people talk about open source now they're talking about open source as defined by the open source initiative we're talking about software that meets these 10 criteria yes people use the term open source way before Linus Torvalds and Eric Raymond but they were talking about open source as the source is open available you can view the source code they're talking about source available back when they were talking about open source open source now means something completely different it means you have to meet these 10 criteria you don't meet one of these 10 criteria you are in fact not open source so again it's a different way i know it's confusing but free software actually means something you have to meet those four essential freedoms open source actually means something it means you have to meet those 10 criteria now free software doesn't mean it's free of charge that has nothing to do with free software open source doesn't mean the source code needs to be available that's one very very small part of what open source actually means now let me briefly talk about another point of confusion with people about odyssey because i made that video the other day about odyssey and people were like you know what odyssey is owned by google so just like youtube so odyssey is no different why are you even talking about this dt what the hell's wrong with you and they're right when you go to the google search engine and type google bought odyssey and look february of 2015 so more than seven years ago google acquires odyssey an app for private photo and video sharing i don't know it was some app that google i think either wanted themselves or really what they probably wanted to do was just get rid of the app altogether many times these gigantic companies will buy a smaller company just to get rid of them because their product competes with you know google i'm sure has apps for photo and video sharing so they bought this company called odyssey spelled the exact same way if you read the article it even tells you yeah they bought odyssey which has the ios and android app for this video sharing thing and the acquisition was announced on odyssey's home page at odyssey.com right if you click the link it's actually odyssey.com like you so naturally this is really confusing you think oh this is legit that odyssey is in fact owned by google no so here's the thing odyssey the odyssey that google bought was a completely different company than odyssey that exists today the odyssey that google bought was not blockchain based again they were doing this photo sharing video sharing app mobile apps and things like that this is the crunch base page for that odyssey company which is founded by two i'm assuming indian gentleman judging by the names the headquarters was in san francisco it was founded in 2011 and of course it was closed down in february of 2015 so this was a long time ago right different company and i can verify that because odyssey.com today is owned by library ink lbr y ink let's go to the crunch base page for library lbr y it was founded in 2015 i actually checked the exact date library ink was founded in may of 2015 so three months after google bought and killed the other odyssey right and the founders are not the same founders jeremy kaufman you guys probably seen jeremy on many videos and podcasts talking about the library app and library protocol he's very active on social media he's not those two indian gentlemen that founded the other odyssey you know seven years ago he's doing his own thing of course for many years they were building this blockchain a peer-to-peer protocol and this network and it wouldn't be until three or four years after they founded this company that library dot tv you know the actual site that actually you could go watch videos on was created and eventually they decided to shut that down library dot tv and move it to a different site called odyssey to avoid confusion because library is the name of the protocol library is also the name of the the coin the cryptocurrency that everything's based on and then the site itself where you go and watch the videos library dot tv it was too many things that are different all called the same thing all called library so they decided to buy a domain odyssey dot com because google since they killed the company they killed that website too you know the company had odyssey dot com that domain became available library ink multi domain odyssey dot com and we got another company founded now called odyssey different logo founded by one of the founders of library joshua finer you can see here and it is based um they don't have a location here but it's based out of nevada not out of san francisco where the old odyssey was based so different people different locations different times a completely different company it's just a weird coincidence that there was this app and company called odyssey seven years ago that google bought and when they bought the company they get everything the company owns including that domain name they killed that company google bought it just to get rid of that company the domain becomes available and the library guys decide to buy that domain and put something up on it and i know it's it's just a weird string string of coincidences that makes it because i'm sure they didn't think about it like when you do a google search google bought odyssey and it's there and it's pointing to the odyssey dot com website and you think it's all legit it's not it's just again it's just weird coincidence but i promise you library ink has absolutely nothing to do with google and when you think about it if you've ever heard jeremy kaufman the ceo talk about library the whole i mean they're trying to be a youtube killer a google killer they are definitely not owned by google like that they would never sell to google and i don't think google would actually buy them and then let jeremy talk about google the way he actually talks so it's obvious and the odyssey platform i like if you've ever been on odyssey nobody talks about youtube or google in a positive manner anywhere on that platform i understand the confusion and everything i talked about today like i'm not going to sit here and say that the people that are confused by this stuff that you guys are somehow stupid or you're you were too lazy to go investigate this stuff i understand just these google searches i did in many cases are confusing to me like even even now even though i know better some of these google searches that are like i mean vivaldi really is licensed under the bsd license you know you have to dig a little deeper unfortunately and i'm unfortunately you do have these really scandalous nefarious people out there that sometimes are trying to trick you into thinking things that just are not true now before i go i need to thank a few special people i need to thank the producers of this episode devon gabe james maxim matt michael mitchell paul scott west alan armadryak and chuck man ringy dieo guy dylan george lee linus ninja mike urion alexander peace arch and fedora polytech oh this new patron he's gonna make me pronounce something in german i believe realities for list there's no way i pronounce that right but i'm going with it realities for list red prophets demon who will lead these guys they're my high steered patrons over on patreon without these guys this episode would not have been possible the show's also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen all these names you're seeing on the screen right now these are all my supporters over on patreon because i don't have any corporate sponsors guys it's just me and you guys the community if you like my work i want to see more videos about linux free software open source software debunking myths that people have about free and open source software subscribe to district tube over on patreon all right guys peace a website that does nothing but trash google is owned by google really