Caretaker of Sunhillow/DS8.ZONE. Free (Libre) Software enthusiast and promoter. Pronouns: any
Also /u/CaptainBeyondDS8 on reddit and CaptainBeyond on libera.chat.
FSF moved out of its office in August 2024. Note that they removed the address in the newer revision. I guess they took the opportunity to change the example copyright disclaimer to something that didn’t include a racial slur.
It’s not a functional change so I don’t think it warrants a new version number or URL.
Little Kitty Tables
The challenge is that we’re not just selling software, we’re selling an idea - the idea that users deserve control over their computing. We’re not competing on the proprietary software marketplace, we’re offering an alternative to it.
We are already seeing the proprietary software world enshittify. More and more “non-tech” people are looking for a way out. The challenge is to demonstrate that these problems are inherent to the world of proprietary software and not just because “Google is evil.”
Well it wouldn’t be free software, because the requirement to publish source code publicly is at odds with the free software definition; the freedom to do something is not an obligation to do it. Copyleft simply means that if you choose to distribute the software, that you must do so under the terms you received it.
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#Watcom
But, suppose the free software definition was written with this requirement in mind - as other commenters said it would be untenable, and potentially hazardous if you are using the software in a hostile environment.
HAL 9000 has entered the chat
Note that “source available on github” doesn’t necessarily mean it’s free software. You have to look at the license to make sure.
That said I believe Stremio’s repos are licensed freely (the web app looks like it’s GPLv2), but as OP noted their application(s) are proprietary.
Like any company offering “exclusive deals only in the app” the catch is you have to sign up for an account and install an app. That’s one more account and one more app that you would have not normally installed but for the “deal.”
This might be a hot take but the best way to avoid or “bypass” onerous things like the “integrity API” is to opt out of the proprietary world as much as possible. Use exclusively free (Libre) software and technology where you can.
We should not be thinking in terms of how do we get proprietary crapware onto our free systems, because that defeats the purpose of a free system. The idea is to build an alternative to the proprietary world.
I think F-droid is woefully misunderstood especially in privacy circles.
The main benefit of F-Droid is that it works (as best it can) to guarantee software freedom. This means, for each app, you can be assured it is under a free software license, built from corresponding source code, and contains no proprietary components. F-droid has an inclusion policy that forbids proprietary blobs and they have to build everything from source in order to ensure that - however, if the app is reproducible, F-droid can actually verify that the already built app from the developer satisfies the inclusion policy without needing to sign its own builds, which is ideal. It’s important to note that without building from source, there is no way to guarantee that the source corresponds to the binary, which is important for exercising the four freedoms.
I don’t agree with everything F-droid does and I don’t think F-droid is perfect. The security folks have a few valid points, I think, but they fail to offer a solution that solves the same problem that F-droid does, either because they misunderstand what problem that is, or simply do not care about it. F-droid is not an app store, it’s a community-maintained distribution like a GNU/Linux distribution. App stores are not alternatives to F-droid and serve different problems. There is, as far as I know, no other project that attempts to serve the same purpose as F-droid.
No. This isn’t a thing. Don’t try to make it a thing.
Once something leaves your computer you lose control of it. The recipient can do whatever they want with the message. If you don’t trust the recipient not to be malicious then don’t send them anything sensitive. You can’t untell a secret.
Proprietary software in general, Discord and Twitter in specific
microG replaces the Play services application on your device, but it’s still going to be dependent on Google servers if you are using push notifications. There’s no way around that unless the app supports a non-Google alternative such as UnifiedPush or even just a web socket.
Plenty of people who (I assume) are smarter than Trump don’t understand that FOSS refers to freedom, not price. It’s not a very good term and I don’t like how widely used it is now.
The one that says that Android is Linux therefore every Android device is a Linux phone (or tablet, etc).
This is often dismissed as a technicality but as every thread on so-called “mobile Linux” demonstrates, so-called “Linux phones” are judged basically on how well they can run Android crapware… just as “desktop Linux” is more or less judged solely on how well it can run Windows apps. Unlike Windows, however, Android is open source(-ish) and already a Linux operating system.
Most people who want to “switch to Linux” don’t actually care about Linux, they just want Windows that doesn’t suck. I imagine most people who want “mobile Linux” similarly want a non-sucky Android… which actually exists, unlike Windows.
If what you want is “Mobile Linux that can run Android apps” go install GrapheneOS or LineageOS or whatever.
“linux phone”
Don’t make me tap the sign
Framing this as a problem specific to open source implies that proprietary applications are inherently more trustworthy. Regardless, the reason to use free software is so you can have the four freedoms, not necessarily because it is easier to audit.
This is strikingly similar to an account on reddit that has been posting variations of some LLM-generated screed about the supposed problem of trust in open source. I wonder what the end goal of this is.
It’s a cultural thing mainly. Things like rust and npm came out of the “Github generation” of open source developers which trend towards permissive licensing, in part thanks to Github’s own anti-copyleft bias. Github’s founder openly advocated to “open source almost everything” (the “almost” part being “core business value”), arguing that open source serves as a foundation upon which to build proprietary products. In this world, participating in open source is merely a way to gain PR and volunteer labor for the proprietary product.
I’m not automatically opposed to permissive licensing (nor is FSF/GNU, in fact!) but in making it the norm we put proprietary software companies in control of what ultimately becomes available in the commons.
It’s not free and open source.
I am not exactly defending this particular scheme but the source code is available under a free software license. It’s only the binaries that are under a proprietary EULA.
No part of a free software license requires that binaries be made available (gratis or otherwise) or that users be allowed to submit bug reports or feature requests. It is also not against the free software movement philosophy to sell free software.
This came up during the GPLv3 drafting period. Bradley Kuhn (whose surname is a homonym of this word) relayed personal experience. One commenter said they experienced being called this slur. It’s unfortunately still a problem.