Open-source software (FOSS preferred)

FYI, there isn’t really such a thing as “OSS but not FOSS.” The free software definition and the open source definition mostly overlap. Anything that is free software is almost always open source and vice versa.

This is an ad

i wonder what percentage of jolla customers still mistakenly believe SailfishOS to be open source? (most of the ones i’ve met did…)

Or they admit that it contains “some proprietary components” but don’t really elaborate, perhaps because they themselves do not know which components those are. Still, the insinuation is that it’s mostly free or that the proprietary bits are so insignificant they do not matter, which I’m skeptical of.

Haven’t used it, but generally I don’t prefer hardened browsers. IMO the tradeoffs aren’t worth it, personally.

People promoting proprietary software, which directly goes against the rules and purpose of this community

As the article notes they are planning to invest 9 million euros in the transition, so they clearly don’t expect it to be “free of cost.” The difference is paying 15 million euros to license some proprietary American product, versus investing 9 million euros in the free software world.

Interesting detail - the word filter is a per-instance side thing. On a foreign instance I can see the original word.

(I don’t have a problem with the intent of the filter but I kind of expected that the s-thorpe problem had been fixed by now)

“more repos = more apps out of the box” sounds nice in theory but IMO this is more of a downside than it might appear. Having a bunch of repos enabled out of the box means you have to be more careful about which repo offers what app and some apps are even offered in multiple repos. I got bit by this when I installed an app from IzzyOnDroid instead of F-Droid by accident.

With F-Droid you get the baseline repo that has high standards and then you can opt in to having additional repos that may have different or lower standards. Having those extra repos enabled by default may give a false reassurance that those other repos also conform to F-Droid’s standards, or that those other apps are “in F-Droid” when really they’re in IzzyOnDroid or some other third party repo. I’ve seen enough instances of that and there are a few even in this thread.

Note that, although (AFAIK) the Accrescent client is free software, it’s hardcoded to only support their own store which last I checked had no guarantee that it only offers free software. Its marketing seemed to rely a lot on spreading FUD about F-Droid even though it fundamentally serves a different purpose than F-Droid.

This thread is specifically about Android apps, so maybe the better suggestion would be “Fennec F-Droid”

Do you mean F-Droid Basic? F-Droid Classic is a fork, that hasn’t been updated in several years

They may be talking about F-Droid Basic

Given that the server end is self-hostable one could just bundle the frontend and the backend into a single package and run that as an app. I imagine that might be a bit too much though.

“It’s not foss but something something privacy…” Proprietary software, not even once.

“AI” is whatever (it’s a meaningless buzzword - some “AI features” I like and some I don’t care about) but proprietary is a dealbreaker.

Why does it need to be proprietary?

No but you see Linux is good and holy and Google is evil, so anything it touches becomes evil and corrupt. Android and ChromeOS cannot be Real Linux because they are corrupted by evil Google cooties.

Switching to a proprietary license doesn’t “fund open source” it funds proprietary software

Which, fine, if your business model is incompatible with an open source license then sure. But don’t present it as something it isn’t

Edit: You can dual license under a strong copyleft (strong enough to scare moochers away) and a proprietary license (fauxpen or traditional).

Test response

There should be a law that any time someone uses the word slam in a news context it should be about someone literally being slammed.