On 2025-12-20 02:51 +0000, John Scott wrote:
. Users of Debian who want to watch YouTube with free software may think this is genuinely a good option that's reasonable to everyone when it isn't.
But it is (a genuinely good option). When a provider does not provide a free-software interface to their service, it is a good thing when someone else does. I'm quite surprised to see people in Debian disagreeing with this view as we are big fans of software freedom here. Re-implementations that talk to APIs are fine. So yes pipe-viewer indebian is entirely appropriate IMHO.
Yes it's possible to write software to abuse a service, but watching video on youtube is not abusing the service - that's what it's for. I don't think your analogy with respect to Salsa is equivalent. Yes Google could upload files to Salsa and people could download them. Fine, so long as those files are free software, and something to do with Debian, that's what the service is for. If they were using it for non-free or non-debian files that would be abusing the service. We certainly don't care what client people use to do that downloading. Wookey -- Principal hats: Wookware, Debian http://wookware.org/ Matrix: @wookey:matrix.org
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