@jellyfish_umbrella @Mastodon I may or may not have written a big post explaining that it isn't the case, but in fact it is 😵‍💫

But no, the specific part that you refer as non-free is categorized as such due to Google needing firebase for the firebase cloud messaging that android devices with Google play services use for notifications. The part that mastodon uses to interact with firebase is Foss, but as firebase itself isn't, it gets categorized as a non-free server dependency 😁