I'm Not Invidious

On June 8, 2023 Invidious received an e-mail from Google/YouTube to ask the project to be stopped.

Even though this e-mail is invalid from the start (since Invidious doesn’t use any part of the YouTube API and doesn’t do anything illegal), some people people asked me why I’m not stopping my work on Invidious, so here’s the explanation:

The e-mail is addressed “To Whom It May Concern”, the reality is that it doesn’t “concern” me.

The e-mail continues with “We recently became aware of your product or service, Invidious (“Your Client”), which is being offered at invidious.io.” here lies the important part:

Invidious isn’t my “product or service”, it isn’t “my Client”. I don’t own any part of it and it isn’t trademarked by me. Moreover it isn’t “offered at invidious.io” (though, it is unrelated to the premise of this post).

Invidious also isn’t “me” or “mine”, therefore, I wasn’t asked anything.

This is the important part, which make this whole e-mail unapplicable by me by design.

Invidious isn’t my project, I don’t own the “Invidious” trademark, I’m not Invidious, I don’t represent Invidious. I’m just… me.

Invidious is.

Thanks to FOSS anyone can contribute to Invidious, I just contribute (sometimes) to it, but it’s in no way, my project, even if I or any other contributor stop working on Invidious, the project will still be.

Any use I ever did of “we” or “us” is just a summarization to avoid saying the name of all the other contributors (because of pure laziness).

If Google/YouTube want me to stop, they just have to ask me to stop (not that they have any ground to ask me to, I never did anything illegal, and I don’t agree to the YouTube term of services / developer policies anyway).

If they still ask me for whatever reason to stop working on Invidious, I’ll stop.

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/jpyFguW