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charmbracelet/vhs a cli tool installs Chrome in the background without permission - is this still Open Source? (github.com)
submitted 1 hour ago by to c/opensource@lemmy.ml
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So this issue is brought up by me over 2.5 years ago, and nothing changed since then. The issue is now the in top 3 highest upvoted Issue on this repo. At what point is it still open source, if it downloads without your permission a proprietary component that is used to run the software?

It connects to Google server and downloads Google Chrome. One user reported this process cannot be stopped with Ctrl+c (I didn't try that). It does not ask your permission to do so, and on the README nothing about this was (and still is) disclosed. All I asked is to add an information in the README, so anyone is warned and informed about this before installing. After over 2 years, none of the developers and contributors even acknowledge the issue or any comment whatsoever.

Note: vhs is a terminal application to record input and output of your terminal commands, to replay them later without video recording. Cool project and concept, but this is a no go and to me even malicious.

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[–] 4 points 58 minutes ago (1 child)

Technically it is open source if .. the source is open source. Then, if it uses proprietary components under the hood as binaries, well... In that case any windows tool that uses Msvc redistributable would not be able to be open source.....

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 45 minutes ago

    Agreed. I understand that, but my question wasn't meant to be a technical one. It was more like "is this still spirit of Open Source, if the core application is not part of the source, and it does all of that without permission". At least those Windows tools you mention, are using part of the operating system without doing something without permission (hopefully).

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    • [–] [S] 7 points 1 hour ago*

    https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema is an alternative almost as much popular as vhs. I used it in the past after removing vhs, but its years ago and don't know how they actually compare. Someone recommended this in the comments few weeks ago, I had completely forgotten about it. I recommend asciinema instead vhs, if you want record and playback terminal sessions without videos involved. I think you can even edit and make changes to the recording, as it is just a text file: https://docs.asciinema.org/manual/asciicast/v3/ (its based on a newline delimited JSON format)

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