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f-droid website says "This app promotes or depends entirely on a non-free network service" -- whats that all about?



Because YouTube itself is non-free as in proprietary software


right, i knew that -- thanks max :D


You should use peertube instead. Saddly there isn't much content there, but try to look there first and reward those who post there with your eyeballs.


Peertube is useful, but so little used that I have 3 of the top 20 videos on Hardlimit, and they're tech demos of a rather obscure program. The most popular has 2,500 views.

What might be useful is some way to use PeerTube distribution on any .mp4 file. Peertube is only a caching system, not a replicated hosting system like BitTorrent. You have to host one copy of the file somewhere. You should be able to put that master copy on any low-end web server, generate a Peertube URL for it, and let Peertube spool it out. Peertube works by mooching bandwidth off the people watching, so as viewership goes up, so do serving resources.


I disagree with f-droid on using the term "non-free" for network services, because it conflates the issue of software freedom with SaaS.

See https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...

> Many free software supporters assume that the problem of SaaSS will be solved by developing free software for servers. For the server operator's sake, the programs on the server had better be free; if they are proprietary, their developers/owners have power over the server. That's unfair to the server operator, and doesn't help the server's users at all. But if the programs on the server are free, that doesn't protect the server's users from the effects of SaaSS. These programs liberate the server operator, but not the server's users.




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