Lemmy is software anyone can develop and everyone controls, libre software, which makes it very hard for Lemmy to abuse us. To keep it this way, share the ideas of software freedom.
- Always check its software license: always check it is libre software (video guide here).
- Also avoid service as a software substitute.
- Libre software plus decentralisation [federation or peer-to-peer] is ideal.
- Remember, ‘open source’ misses the point.
If we focus on warning against individual apps, we must repeat our time and effort everytime new malware appears. So, target a common property: its software license.
With proprietary software, we are not the user, we are the used.
Technicly the Lemmy source code owners could change the license as they hold the ownership.
It does get a little blurry when there are many different contributors though
I see a lot of people misunderstand these licenses as binding for the original copyright holder/author, when they’re allowed to dual license, or take the project private. They just can’t remove the license from any code already released.
True