It might be a good idea to do the exact opposite I.e. make a OSS whitelist. It will be much easier to maintain given the scale of applications/services/products.
Although I agree, it’s tough to make a whitelist than a blacklist, as the latter requires only 1 bad decision, the former is tough to assess (how many good decision to be on the list, ex Microsoft support lots of open source projects, should they be added?)
It’s probably a good idea to have a stronger definition and mission. Here are a few scenarios you should consider.
FSF defines anything that’s not copyleft as hostile. That’s most companies. I personally don’t think I can tell my users what to do with my software other than remove my liability so I vehemently disagree with Stallman.
Mongo wrote the SSPL and MariaDB wrote the BSL. Both licenses are seen as regressions. I personally respect the MariaDB case and have been harassed by too many Mongo salespeople to say the same about them.
Platforms like AWS are the reason companies like CockroachDB and Elastic implemented restrictive licenses.
IBM has been gutting open source through its acquisition of Red Hat. This is a common story; Oracle has been screwing *nix longer.
Protecting trademarks causes a lot of consternation from users. The Rust Foundation is the most recent example of this I remember blowing up the FOSS community.
I like your idea a lot. I think it needs some definition to be very successful!
I personally use Apache 2.0 because it’s been upheld in court. I’m not sure if MPL has been directly challenged in court. Either way, I agree with the sentiment. The legal perspective is why I moved away from MIT/ISC.
you should considwr MPL, if someone found a security vulneravility theyd be legally obligated to tell yoy for example. also, it still allows commerical closed source software. try it!!
FSF defines anything that’s not copyleft as hostile. That’s most companies. I personally don’t think I can tell my users what to do with my software other than remove my liability so I vehemently disagree with Stallman.
I’m not planning on counting that as hostile behavior. Organizations can choose a license for their software (and I can choose not to buy/use it). This collection is mostly focused on companies that hurt existing Open Source software. Such as sending a cease and desist to an unofficial plugin/extension or closing down software that was originally open source.
Maybe your could also add organisations (companies, government agencies, NGOs,…) that create standards in such a way that the standard is hard or impossible to implement in open source implementations?
I was more thinking about things like governments that decide that every implementation of something must be certified to be used, e.g. with wireless technologies. Not so much implementation as specification or legal compliance barriers to open source basically.
You raise a good point though, financial barriers such as per user pricing that are hard to implement for software distributed for free would be quite similar.
Thanks so much I had not been tracking this case but it pissed me off to no end when I heard that Vizio was refusing to uphold the GPL. They are more than happy to greatly benefit from the labors of open source development but the second they have to do the smallest step in support of the GPL, they fight it. I doubt there is anything overly interesting that they could release. My mind is assuming they don’t want anyone to see the actual level of their data gathering.
The best outcome would be setting a precedent that allows FOSS organisations to send threatening letters to companies that violate the license. An individual dev maintaining a small library may theoretically be able to win a lawsuit, but practically? lmao good luck
It might be worth something for the open source community to consider open funding for a group that would help devs to do just that. It wouldn’t help everyone. But it might help enough to make an impact for everyone.
I think this could even be related to the idea of post-open source that Bruce Perens talked about. An organisation which helps its members handle the business-y parts of running large community projects. They could handle funding, legal representation, marketing and any other support that members may want. A large number of members would make it that much more effective as well.
Significantly overblown. Most of the opened github issues were by the same person. Seems someone doesn’t like it and is trying to spam the issue and frame it as a bigger deal than it really is.
What apps you install depends on your needs and preferences. It might help others if you include those in any future requests for suggestions.
I suggest not worrying too much about “removing your dependence on closed ecosystems” immediately. Just do as you did before, changing apps as you find better alternatives—only, this time, considering the advantages of FOSS. Simply by giving F-droid apps a chance before opening (I assume) the Play Store, you’re already doing better than the vast majority of people.
Regarding discoverability and security, I believe participation in the community helps:
The Venn diagram of “FOSS app users” and “software enthusiasts” is closer to a circle. People like talking about useful, good software they like. Word of mouth recommendations is how I got into this stuff.
You’ll be more likely to hear urgent actionable news (e.g. X app developer sold to bad company, here’s the fork that will carry the torch onwards).
And so that this comment isn’t completely useless… Mozilla are currently working on a mobile version of Thunderbird for Android, built on top of K9 mail. Been using the beta and liking it so far. If you want a FOSS e-mail app, keep an eye on that one.
P.S. I much prefer the dark side, and don’t forget the cookies!
My bad, I forgot you need to be careful using such metaphors when talking about software. It’s as the other commenter said: a rebrand, but they might keep the old identity around for people who like it.
K-9 is rebranding as Thunderbird for Android, indeed. But since many users of K-9 expressed their desire to keep the logo and name of K-9, Thunderbird agreed to publish both versions: one rebranded as Thunderbird for Android, and the other keeping its original branding as K-9. We will see whether that will complicate things for Thunderbird team too much yet.
As someone who has used this app for at least 6 years, I am very sad to see this happen.
I’m surprised they weren’t able to get away with it after the change in extensions a couple versions ago. By not shipping extensions that have copyrighted content that should have been enough, similar to how emulators, services like Plex and torrenting applications survive.
It’s effectively just a comic / manga reader that can be used for piracy when the right extensions are added.
Apparently that wasn’t enough, and I can’t blame open source devs for not wanting to start a legal battle with a profit-earning company.
For now, the app does allow you to add external repository’s (list of extensions for various sources) that are still being updated, and I believe there are at least a few forks of the project that will survive for now.
All I can say is great work to the dev team for sticking with us until now and I wish you luck in your future ventures.
I always thought about why don’t FOSS projects that are at risk of getting sued by big corp like (NewPipe, Popcorn Time, streamio, tachiyomi …) embrace the dark web or git over torrent via VPN, so their projects don’t get threatened with take downs. z-library ended having to move to the dark web after all.
The fee could be really small but scale depending on factors like business size. Or there could be no fee outright for businesses smaller than a certain size.
I just learned about it yesterday. Seems like Vivaldi but on gecko, which I always wanted to see.
Unfortunately it seems like it’s maintained by only one overworked dev. It needs more funding and more devs.
The most similar, not to say identical to floorp, is Midori. Other which try to recreate old Opera is Otter (Qt5, not Gecko), also nice, private, FOSS and blazing fast.
Midori seems pretty shady. I remember it as a super minimalistic browser, but now it seems like they are straight up taking someone elses work and just changing the name and sponsor links within. I tried it and it seems like 1:1 copy of floorp.
What I said, anyway try also Otter, even if it isn’t a Gecko browser (AFAIK it also admits in last versions the import of Chrome extensions (Qt5 is a fork of Blink), also userscripts without the need of Tamper, Greay or Violentmonkey). It will be also the fastest browser you ever have tested.
I did try Otter in the past when I was looking for the Opera replacement, never really liked it. It seems like it’s pretty dead…last update was 2 years ago. And speed was never really my priority for the browser anyways. I’m not really looking to replace my browser, I’m happy with Vivaldi, I just like to check what else is there. I was happy to see that there is a browser based on gecko that seems to be going in the similar direction as Vivaldi.
No, only some parts are not updated some years, but the last core update is from 10 hours ago, others from a month. It’s a very small community and logical that the developement isn’t so active as in the big ones. The last updates also includes the possibility to use extensions, before not prossible. But yes, it’s always better to use browsers in active developement and community. Which isn’t the case in indie and marginal browsers and forks, mostly 1-2 devs projects.
AFAIK it’s maintained by a group called Ablaze and I think I saw them mention they are university students and opensource enthusiasts in Github discussions.
There are blog posts on their site about changes to their team and leadership. Their blog is in Japanese but I just translate it with Firefox’s inbuilt translator. So I don’t think it’s a single dev.
Pretty much but they claim to be ‘communists’ (though realistically they solely support the Chinese and Russian governments and never actually discuss communism as an economic policy) and isolated themselves from the rest of the fediverse for years. Last year they finally federated with everyone and were quickly defederated by most large instances because they’re absolutely insufferable trolls who do nothing but fling feces and brigade in every post.
One of the bigger communist instances, like Lemmygrad.
They are infamous half because they are a big instance with a shared fringe worldview that is anathems to liberal democracy, so when something pops up in their feed, cultures clash.
The other half is that at least some of their users do like to use alts to “agitate” which is mostly trolling.
It’s literally just a link. They don’t send shit to Kayak unless you decide yourself to click that link. Yes, Kayak could track you. That’s true of most sites they could link to. They also advertise this fact pretty clearly. And as far as I can tell, didn’t they confirm it would be made opt-in?
opensource
Top
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.