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Comment by andrepd

13 hours ago

There are excellent FOSS gallery apps already, like the Fossify suite. Why not use them I wonder?

Their license is invalid due to being GPLv3. GPLv3 cannot be included in GrapheneOS as that would necessitate GrapheneOS give up their permissive licensing.

Refra Gallery is licensed as Apache 2.0, which is a permissive license GrapheneOS can bundle in the OS.

  • Its not part of the OS so why would it affect the Graphene OS license? Its an app, not a library.

    • The Refra gallery fork would replace the current ancient gallery app. That would be bundled with the OS. Doing the same with the fossify suite or similar would be illegal. These licenses do not treat apps or libraries differently. GPLv3 code forces the code that it is bundled with to also be GPLv3.

  • Can the Linux kernel be included in the OS?

    • Yes, AOSP includes a lot of GPLv2 code and we use GPLv2 licensing ourselves including for our Vanadium browser project. We don't want GrapheneOS to be more restrictively licensed than the Linux kernel and AOSP so we avoid GPLv3 code bundled with the OS. GPLv3 is perfectly acceptable for apps in our App Store but we don't want it for the ones in the OS.

We're going to be forking one of them (ReFra). We want to make extensive changes and have a different vision for it than the upstream project. For example, we don't want it to have integration into services. There's plenty of room for both an increasingly different fork of it in GrapheneOS and the original project which our users will continue to use who want features we don't consider inside the scope of what we want from a local gallery app.

Media handlers are a security nightmare, might lead you to the right answer if it isn’t it.