TL;DR:

The mods of /r/opensource strongly object to the changes to the third-party app API. However, we (the moderators) choose not to use the subreddit in participation of protests surrounding the API changes for third-party apps. There are some temporary-ish rules concerning these events.

Full Explanation

We exist on Reddit at a pragmatic level. Reddit had historically embraced releasing parts of their system under the CPAL license and today can in no way be considered an Open platform. While more appropriate Open platforms may exist, Redditors should still have a subreddit that encourages them to embrace Open Source. While we exist on Reddit for users that choose to use Reddit, we must follow the rules set out by Reddit, including the moderator code of conduct.

We recently had a moderator attempt to shut down the subreddit. I said this then, and I’ll say it again:

[we] fully intend on continuing to facilitate a healthy community here in /r/opensource.

Part of that includes not leveraging the subreddit in a protesting shutdown (even temporary). It’s a violation of the ToS and has previously resulted in the replacement of moderators (not just here) rather than motivating meaningful change. I do not have confidence that our replacements would care about Open Source the way the moderators do today.

This line of reasoning does present an interesting juxtaposition, where we moderate this community on a platform antithetic to our goals. There is definitely merit to this idea. The first is why we began to exist here at all. I honestly can’t explain that, as the community was created back at the start of 2008 (before even the great Digg migration of 2010). Reddit was mostly Open Source itself back then, so there wouldn’t have been the same cognitive dissonance as there is today. I don’t even have the history of the subreddit to provide you, sans the last almost 2 years from when I joined the moderation team. What I know today is that you the user of Reddit are here reading and participating on the subreddit. Every user that chooses to continue to use Reddit continues to justify the subreddit’s existence as an outreach.

As users of Reddit, we should make our voices heard. I personally use RiF, and the changes to the third-party API greatly frustrate me, alongside users of other apps, including Open Source ones. You can comment in this thread on how you feel about these changes, but do mind the site-wide rules as well as rule-1. Similarly, you should share in this thread platforms that are Open in nature: that embrace what it means to be Open Source. You can also seek out interaction on other subreddits discussing the third-party API changes, as well as expressing yourself on other platforms entirely.

Temporary-ish Rules

Do not make separate posts about Reddit “alternatives” or these changes, and especially don’t advertise communities (in this thread or as posts) of closed platforms like Discord. You can think of this as a “megathread”.

/edit2: Adjustments will be made.

The long story short, if your project uses AI, is made by AI, or is intended for AI, it's not welcome on r/opensource. AI, as it exists today, is incongruent to this Open Source community.

We're going to be implementing a few new enforcement criteria to this end to discourage those projects:

• Projects advertised here must be all of: 1 year old (not just age, but actively maintained), have multiple contributors (subjectively 3+), not be a common capstone project (school projects, such as note-taking, PDF viewers, cli music players, etc), not be intended for AI (such as MCPs), and have an existing community. No, we can no longer field requests asking for maintainers or people to contribute. Of course it still needs an OSI license as it's always been.

• Though not "new", 1 year account age minimum, with significant Reddit contributions. You should not be creating a Reddit account to come here; we're a community of existing redditors. If you send us a message in modmail about this after having attempted to post, you will be permanently banned and muted. If this seems harsh, know that I estimate 20 messages a day from people expecting their slop projects and burner accounts to get an exception.

• If it's obvious you're using AI in your project, we don't want it. Tokens are cheap, and we don't care how many you spent to make your amazing project.

• If you don't speak English, you need to find a different community. We cannot distinguish between AI-written and AI-translated. Since you don't speak English, you can't even verify yourself if it translated correctly.

• Temporary bans are only for community members that made temporary lapses in judgement, such as when getting agitated. If you post (or comment) things we don't want, such as the result of your LLM output tokens, you will never be welcome back.

If you want to be a part of the cleanup crew, be sure to reach out. If you don't like keeping this community for the humans, let me know so I can make sure you see your way out; maybe go try r/opensourceeai (sic).

If you have suggestions for anything I missed, please do let me know. Organizations that are officially incorporated under 501(c), or (d) (e) (f) (k), or 521(a), or the equivalents in their country, are exempt from project and account minimums, provided they reach out in modmail and get approval ("approved users") prior to their first post. Note that isn't limited to just 501(c)(3), purposefully so.

/Edit: Shout out to these communities. Let's cheer them on! Hopefully they will be an great refuge for those affected by this policy.

• /r/opensourcez

• /r/OpenSourceAIAllowed

• /r/TrueOpenSource

• /r/OpenSourceWare

• /r/ActuallyOpenSource

https://www.boostervideos.net/about

We’re two brothers who decided to build a new video platform from scratch. We’ve been working on this project, called Booster, for about two months now.

The idea came from our own frustration with existing video platforms. With Booster, we’re trying to improve the experience by using voluntary ads that give rewards to users, allowing them to boost and support their favorite channels and friends directly, and avoid content made with AI and Vertical Short Form videos.

The theme you see right now in the screen is now available for free to every user who logs in and creates a new account. We would like to know from webdevs, how we can improve it and make it better, and also know if there is any bugs or something you would llike to point out.

Regarding costs, we've solved the high costs of infrastructure thanks to our provider, so it doesn't pose a big expense, thanks to their encoding and CDN.

Regarding revenue, monetization currently would come from a virtual currency called XP, which users can either earn for free by watching voluntary feature videos or purchase. XP is used to boost channels and buy personalization assets. We also plan to implement voluntary, rewarded ads that give users free XP. The goal is to test whether users and creators actually like and adopt this model.

Moderation is made through community votes, which are a way of letting the users and the common viewer decide if the report of a specific user was accurate or not.

In the link, we've included the about page, which includes how Booster works, plus the Discord and the open GitHub.

I remember back in the 2000s, OpenOffice was THE free alternative to the big Microsoft monopoly and for a poor high school student like I was back then, it was a real lifesaver. For that reason, I will forever remain grateful to the OpenOffice project.

Fast forward to 2021 and it's really sad to see what happened to the project. Now, I'm fully aware that LibreOffice is by far the more actively developed office suite. And that's great. I love LibreOffice too and I have both office suites installed on my computer. But, I also still feel OpenOffice deserves a bit more respect. Reddit and most of the open source community loves to hate OpenOffice but they seem to fail to realize that if OpenOffice had never existed, then LibreOffice wouldn't exist either.

Currently, OpenOffice is handicapped by a severe lack of developers and a license (Apache) that allows competitors (e.g. LibreOffice) to reuse its code but not the other way round. Google's AOSP project shows that permissively licensed software projects can still thrive however given the proper resources, direction, and strategy.

Of course, the Apache Software Foundation has nowhere near the amount of resources compared with Google, so any hopes of OpenOffice improving its code to the point where it can be the upstream to LibreOffice (as in the old Go-oo days) is extremely unlikely. And given the open source community's current contempt for OpenOffice (despite the fact that it is no longer owned by Oracle) as well as the poorly maintained state of its codebase, it's unlikely that the community will swoop in to save it either.

I feel that the only real hope for OpenOffice at this stage is for it to picked up by a corporate developer that is willing to put in the effort and resources to make it a serious competitor again. Originally, that was supposed to be IBM. But they only made a half-assed attempt at it before pulling their developers out completely in 2014.

And now, given the popularity of LibreOffice (especially among the Linux crowd) and the growing trend towards cloud-based/SaaS alternatives for the Mac/Windows crowd, I doubt any companies would be interested in "rescuing" OpenOffice.

So r/opensource, let's brainstorm some ideas! What do you think we can do to save OpenOffice?

Dear GOD/GODS and/or anyone else who can HELP ME (e.g. MEMBERS OF SUPER-INTELLIGENT ALIEN CIVILIZATIONS):

The next time I wake up, please change my physical form to that of FINN MCMILLAN of SOUTH NEW BRIGHTON at 8 YEARS OLD and keep it that way FOREVER.

I am so sick of this chubby Asian man body!

Thank you!

- CHAUL JHIN KIM (a.k.a. A DESPERATE SOUL)

I'm sure by now we heard the stories of why OPNSense staff branched off to create their own fork of PFSense and the drama that followed. But it looks like PFSense staff never changed their tune. They have just been more quite about how they go around abusing its userbase.

Below is my post I created on PFSense/Netgate subreddit. It simply pointed out that KEA DHCP had issues and it wasnt ready for production and to be careful if you decide to use it. After it received attention the Netgate moderators started trolling me on the post. Especially the moderator named "gonzopancho" who made 4 nasty comments on the post, than locked it right away before anyone could respond.Within 12 hours of the post I was ban from both PFSense and Netgate Subreddits...

Because this and past drama I decided to move myself and all my clients to OPNSense instead. At least they care about their community.Below is the original link from the now removed post. As you can see nothing violates terms of service or rules on the subreddit. They just didn't like that I was critical about them pushing notifications to PFSense devices telling people to migrate to KEA even through they knew it was broken.

Original Post:
https://www.reddit.com/r/PFSENSE/comments/1gg6p2y/dont_use_kea_dhcp_its_not_ready_yet/ Post

As can be seen. Users were not happy with this and the childish behavior of Netgate staff. Because of this I will never recommend anyone use PFSense.

Amazon Link

Just seems like the old texts have been forgotten. Highly recommended for mods and members alike.

YouTube Interaction Manager – automate likes for your favorite channels (Chrome & Firefox)

Backstory: I watch a lot of YouTube and want to support my favorite creators, but I honestly just forget to hit the like button.

So I built a "set and forget" manager to handle interactions based on my own rules.

Key Features:

• Whitelist: Auto-like videos from channels you trust.

• Blacklist: Auto-dislike channels you want to avoid.

• History & Privacy: Keep a local log of actions or disable logging entirely.

• Timing Control: Trigger instantly, after X seconds, or after watching X% of the video.

• Smart Delays: "Humanize" mode adds random delays so interactions feel natural.

Technical:

• Cross-Browser: Optimized for both Chrome and Firefox.

• Private: 100% Local (Storage API), no tracking, no external servers.

• Open Source: MIT License.

Chrome Web Store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youtube-auto-like/nlpclmfebmnahbhffafphgnajkbkiaib

GitHub / Firefox Download: https://github.com/fastfingertips/youtube-interaction-manager

Your Terminal Companion for the Holy Quran: Read, Listen & Generate Subtitles for Video Editing! 🔗 GitHub: QuranCLI

Demo screenshots: https://github.com/anonfaded/QuranCLI?tab=readme-ov-file#-demo--screenshots

🌟 Key Features

• 📖 Read Anywhere – Access all 114 Surahs with English translation (Simple & Uthmani Arabic scripts).

• 🎧 Listen – Stream audio recitations from various renowned reciters with full playback controls (play/pause/seek).

• 🎬 Subtitle Generation – Create .srt subtitle files (Arabic + English) for Ayah ranges – perfect for video editing!

• 🌐 Subtitle Sharing – Built-in web server to easily share generated subtitle files with other devices (phone, tablet, other PCs) on the same Wi-Fi network.

• 💾 Smart Caching – Works offline by caching Quran text and audio locally.

• 🎨 Intuitive Interface – Colorful, responsive, and easy-to-navigate terminal UI.

• 🔄 App Auto-Updates – Notifies you of new app versions available on GitHub.

• 📊 Stats – See total download counts directly in the header.

I get that the nostalgia for the 90s is at an all time high, but open source software has had the old Windows XP look for as long as i can remember.

To me it's fascinating that these UI elements are even available! I don't know in which deep archive one must dig to find these beige color schemes and pixelated 8-bit color icons, but somehow these programmers all seem to fint and implement them in their open source programs.

Now I ain't one to judge, you will never find me complaining about a program interface that someone made for free and decided from the goodness of their heart to release out into the world. Tough i am perplexed by how new programs and regularly maintained big projects still have this old and by now outdated design.

Of course change is scary and nobody is more infamous for being set in their ways than hardened developers. Ones who have experienced the horror of begrudgingly implementing new technologies only for it to be dropped as soon as the next hip thing comes out, but to me it seems this mindset is hurting open source potential and reach by so much.

Design is not an unfortunate requirement on top of a coding magnus opus, it's how a program communicates with the user, if it can't do that properly than doesn't that make it a bad program? I simply don't understand who is defending keeping this style, are there simply no designers out there?

Sometimes i can see it working well. Hannah Montana Linux is after all a masterfull showcase of design and functionality, but the industry moved away from this design for a good reason. I want to know what is stopping the open source community from moving along with it?

PS. I love the open source community, but this is a question that i have had burning in my mind for the longest time. I only want what's best for these projects, no hate intended ❤

DISCLAIMER: Im posting this to be informative. I do not intend for this post to cause a witch hunt. I just want to bring attention to this and understand what I should do next.

Valve has been working on a program for the Steam Frame named "lepton". It's purpose is to allow android game to be played on SteamOS, like Proton but for Android. Now lepton's code is heavily based on a preexisting open source program named "waydroid". Waydroid is GPL-licensed, which means anyone is free to copy, use, and modify its code so long you also provide the source code of any projects the code was used for upon request. I have been very very excited to play around with lepton ever since it's inception last December. Shortly after it became downloadable on Steam I opened a support ticket (which was the only way to contact Valve I could find) where I politely requested the source code of lepton, explained that they are obligated to provide it under the GPL license terms, and ended by saying that I understand if this is out of scope of their position and to refer to me the reverent legal or licensing contact. A few days later, Valve responded. The support agent told me that they were unable to help with "3rd party software", that I had to contect the application's developer, and then closed the ticket before I could respond. The agents seemingly misunderstood my request and assumed that lepton was a third party program that was distributed through Steam. While I totally get where they got confused, I still find it weird how they seeming had no knowledge of lepton whatsoever.

Determined, I opened a new support ticket the next day where I referenced the original case number, explained the the previous support agent's misunderstanding, and then explained the terms of the GPL license that they were bound to, as well as clarifying how this is a first party program developed by Valve that they intend to ship with SteamOS.

After this thing got VERY weird. I was ignored by Steam support with zero response. Now, I've written to Steam support many times for a variety of things over the past few years, and they always had responded within a week at most. At this point I had become increasingly aggrvated over this. About a week and a half of silence, I updated the ticket with a follow-up. My follow-up was written on August 13th. Since then I've heard nothing. Crickets.

At this point I don't know what to do. I can't find any legal email contact for Valve and feel like im at a dead end. This honestly feels like what Bambu Lab did a few years back (albeit WAY less serious) when they refused to provide the source code over a program bound by the same license terms. It really is such a shame to me conistering how much I've idolized Valve for their open-source software and Linux-friendliness. If anyone can help me with what to do I would really appreciate it.

Edits for context:

I was aware that Steam support likely cannot help directly, however I made it clear in both my post and my support ticket that I’m aware this is out of their scope and to relay me to the relevant legal/licensing contact

Many have suggested contacting “[email protected]”, however I cannot find anything about this email online and all sources are saying Valve legal department is mail only

I have since been informed that Waydroid also offers a paid commercial license that does not require making the source code public. I will attempt to contact Valve’s legal team via mail to ask for the specifics of their licensing arrangement. Thank you u/Pleasant_Set_3182 for informing me of this.

UPDATE 1: Waydroid has revealed that they were never contacted by Valve, never sold a license to them, and are just as in the dark as I am.

UPDATE 2: Source code has been published and is available at https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/frame-public/lepton