Captain Beyond

I feel like there’s a lot of FUD around this subject, because people bring it up as if it’s purely a negative without talking about the reasons why it’s done the way it is. The whole point of F-Droid is that it’s a repository (not a store) of free software applications. They have an inclusion policy forbidding proprietary code and dependencies, and in order to enforce this policy they have to build from publicly available source code, and in order to do so they need to sign the builds themselves. This means, yes, you are trusting F-Droid instead of the upstream developer - but given F-Droid has higher standards than upstream developers this is a tradeoff I am willing to make.

Reproducible builds solves this in a way that preserves the standards of F-Droid, however, “security peoples’” favored “alternatives” (such as Accrescent, Obtainium, and Google Play Store/Aurora Store) forego this entirely, showing they don’t either have a viable solution to offer or that they don’t really care about the problem that F-Droid is addressing to begin with.

Same reason anyone would use a dedicated provider-independent client instead of a proprietary web application locked into a single provider: less vendor lock-in, more local control, and so on.

There is, I believe, a fundamental misunderstanding as to what exactly a site like Stack Overflow is. It’s not a forum; there’s no such thing as “your posts.” It’s more like Wikipedia, as in a collaborative question-and-answer site, or a knowledgebase. Each question and answer can be edited like a mini wiki page. They aren’t “yours” any more than the Wikipedia page you created ten years ago is; you contributed it to the commons, so (at least in theory) you don’t have the right to take it back.

Whether whatever "Open"AI is doing is right is another question, of course. But, I don’t think destroying or poisoning the commons to strike back at it is any helpful either; it feels like “destroying it to save it.”

I would certainly hope so. Stack Overflow content is Creative Commons licensed, so the argument is basically that the GDPR would take precedence over the CC license grant. It’d be scary if GDPR could be weaponized against forks of free software projects in this manner.

Software freedom is about what you, the user, run on your own hardware. Different concerns apply to server software. The client side is what matters as that’s what you run on your hardware, but if the server side is free as well then you are not tied to the service provider and can use a different service provider or run your own instance.

With server software, the main concern is “Service as a Software Substitute” - doing your computing on “cloud” (someone else’s computer). See Who does that server really serve?.

NFT Bros 🤝 Twitter Artists

Seething about their jpegs being stolen

You don’t need windows. Remove all your windows and adopt a gnu and a penguin. They’ll keep you safe and private.

Not an endorsement of ExpressVPN, I’ve learned to avoid companies that sponsor on youtube. However, I believe you don’t need the proprietary app to use the service, you could use a free software OpenVPN client such as this one.

They do offer support for OpenVPN although, unsurprisingly, they heavily push their proprietary client as the preferred way to use the service. This alone would be enough to discourage me from using it or recommending it.

Not a copypasta, although given the average community member’s understanding of this issue comes from memes and copypastas, maybe it should become one.

That’s at the core of the myth (and thus the myths surrounding the myth) - that the discussion is about “what to call Linux” when in fact it’s always been about separating Linux from the userland that is often paired with it. Linux is Linux, no matter what compiler you use to build it - but the stuff that runs on top of Linux is not Linux.

I guess I’m being called out here, so wall of text incoming.

Linux and GNU are completely separate projects that have no relationship organizationally or technologically. As basic as this is, this is important to understand as the backdrop for “the GNU/Linux issue.”

Linux was started in 1991 as a project to build an operating system, one that is “not as big or professional as GNU.” In practical terms, Linux is just a kernel. It has no terminal, no command line tools, no desktop, no package manager, no web browser. Yet, people speak of it as if it’s a fully featured operating system that contains all of those things, an alternative to Windows or macOS.

GNU was started in 1983 as a project to build an operating system, but as GNU’s own kernel (the Hurd) is in development hell, the userland components (libraries and tools) are generally used with Linux to form a complete operating system, which is referred to as GNU/Linux. The “slash” is meant to signify that it’s a combination of these two projects. Note that, as the GNU project has adopted the Linux-libre variant of Linux, the Hurd is no longer really a priority project.

Of course, you can have Linux without GNU (Android and Alpine are the best examples of this) and you can also run GNU on non-Linux platforms (Debian has a port that runs on the FreeBSD kernel, and the tools themselves run on any Unixy operating system and even Windows). So I don’t really think you can conclude any of these are the “most important part” of the operating system, and it more or less comes down to whatever brand name you feel the most comfortable with.

And, of course, most GNU/Linux operating systems contain much more than GNU and Linux these days. Therefore, I prefer to understand Linux as a family of operating systems (as Wikipedia defines it) and GNU/Linux as a subfamily. The ironic thing is that, from a UX perspective, Linux, the kernel, is probably the least prominent component of the operating system, as it is furthest away from the user interface - but it is most prominent brand name and so gets applied to the whole “ecosystem.”

A lot of Linux fans think an operating system has to have more than Linux to be a “real Linux” operating system, or that it has to be community run or “anti-corporate” or meet some ideological criteria. But, Linus himself has no such ideology, and Linux is a very corporate project. Android is the most widely used Linux operating system. It is as much “real Linux” as Debian is.

The myth of the fictional operating system called Linux naturally leads to other myths, such as the myth of fragmentation. In that sense I feel it’s harmful, but the damage has been done and even the conversation around the myth has its own myths (such as the idea that Stallman wants to “rename Linux” or is jealous of Linux’s popularity, that “Linux should be called GNU/Linux” because “it contains GNU” or because it was built with GNU tools or licensed under the GPL). It’s hard to argue for “calling it GNU/Linux” when people don’t even understand what “it” is, or even what the admittedly convoluted name is supposed to signify. So, for that reason, I don’t think the “battle” is worth fighting anymore.

For the record, though, I refer to my preferred operating system by its own name, GNU Guix System, and make an effort not to center any particular project or brand name when talking about the free software community and ecosystem in general. I don’t characterize myself as a fan or user of Linux, just a free software enthusiast - the fact that all of my preferred operating systems contain Linux is a consequence of the fact that Linux is the most widely used free software kernel, not because of any brand loyalty on my part. Non-Linux operating systems such as the BSD’s should be considered as part of the free operating system family.

FOSS/privacy community

These are not the same community. The actual free software community has been a thing for 40 years, and the privacy/security people spend as much time attacking free software as they do big tech. I’ve come to believe no security or privacy guy is trustworthy in the free software space. Reject Rossman, return to Stallman.

edit: security guys will say “free software isn’t always more secure!” and privacy guys will say “freedom, what is this freedom? it has no internet access, that’s the only thing that matters!” and meanwhile stuff like WEI is being implemented, that we’ve been warning about for the last 40 years. The security and privacy guys will say you don’t need freedom, just the “best tool for the job” - Chrome was the best browser when it came out, now it’s being used to subjugate the free web. WEI is the end result of treating freedom as a second thought behind security.

The meat carrot is just turkey meat in the shape of a carrot, covered in carrot flavoring made in part from carrot. Yes, one of the ingredients of “meat carrot” is actual carrots.

10+ years of experience in the thing you created 5 years ago, even.

We live in a timeline where desktop apps all run in a browser, whereas mobile websites are all their own apps.

Single board computer (such as Raspberry Pi). As someone who used to host a matrix server I would agree it is fairly heavy and I was the only user of it. There are guides out there for setting it up on a Pi (example) so I suppose it is doable.

I think you’ll find it is no longer “My Computer” but now “This PC”

The reason F-Droid builds from source is to ensure that they can enforce their inclusion criteria. If you go outside F-Droid you lose that guarantee. For example, self-published apks in github or google play may contain anti-features or proprietary code that are forbidden by the F-Droid standards.

From another point of view, what you call a single point of failure is a third party that represents the interests of the user community, independent from individual developers. This is the same model used in GNU/Linux distributions, and Drew DeVault explains here the role that software distributions play in the free software community.

Of course, this represents a trade-off, in that you are placing trust in the software distribution instead of or in addition to the upstream developer. The question is, how can you solve the problem without foregoing F-Droid’s inclusion standards? The answer is reproducible builds, where F-Droid builds from source and compares to the developer’s apk, and publishes the developer’s apk with their signature if the build reproduces successfully.

Until Reproducible builds are the norm in the Android free software world, I accept the trade-off because I value having software freedom in my computing, and I know I can’t trust upstream developers to care about that as much as F-Droid or I do.

Are you talking about a particular app? Usually apps are rejected because they don’t meet the inclusion policy, not merely because “they don’t feel like it.”

I don’t believe you can get F-Droid from Play Store. I would get it from their official website just to be sure.