Gumroad made itself more transparent by releasing its source code and becoming a source-available project. That deserves recognition, even though Gumroad is not open source due to its restrictive license. Software is only open source if it does not discriminate against any person or group, even when the discrimination is viewed as positive.
Placing tariffs on US Big Tech services would accelerate the adoption and development of free and open source software, which benefits not only Europeans, but also people in the US and the rest of the world.
FOSS adware and spyware apps are rare because it’s trivial to fork it and remove the undesirable elements. Users have every incentive to use the ad-free and spyware-free forks, which eventually causes the superior user-friendly forks to overtake the originals. However, proprietary adware and spyware apps cannot be forked in the same way, preventing users from stripping out the ads and tracking. The ability to use, modify, and redistribute “trash software” allows anyone to transform FOSS with undesirable elements into excellent software by removing such elements, whereas proprietary “trash software” remains trashy.
The 5 people who disagree with you:
And, no, you making baseless assertions while attacking everyone who disagrees with you does not count as evidence.
It’s actually 5 people vs. you right now, and anyone can count to confirm it. Calling out the fact that you have produced zero evidence for your wild claims is not “wanting to lie”, it’s just stating what any observer can see.
You said that your “reasoning is experience”, so let this conversation be an experience that challenges your perception of what others think about FOSS.
FOSS has this reputation among most people.
Source? Every commenter here disagrees with you, so it seems like your wild claim is not supported by any evidence.
When you look at any app store, you’ll find that the many apps that are infested with ads, spyware, malware, and dark patterns are pretty much always proprietary. Conversely, any FOSS application that tries to introduce such garbage would be forked to remove these offending attributes, which makes FOSS much higher-quality than proprietary software in general.
You are using false equivalence by incorrectly implying that proprietary software is commercial while FOSS is not. Both FOSS and proprietary software can be sold and commercialized with various monetization strategies. For example, you are currently using Lemmy, a FOSS social network whose development is funded by donations. Nobody here believes that Reddit is better on the basis that it is proprietary adware instead of FOSS.
Free and open source software licenses provide users the right to use, modify, and redistribute the software. Proprietary software does not. That difference makes FOSS inherently better for users than proprietary software.
Proprietary software is also notoriously low-quality and can disappear at any time when the developer loses motivation. Additionally, because the software is closed source, nobody else is able to continue the development of proprietary abandonware. On the other hand, abandoned FOSS projects can be forked and continued, which is something I see often.
Here’s a demonstration of Waydroid on FuriOS and the accompanying blog post from 6 months ago. I’m obviously not a fan of X (Twitter), but the video shows that the app works in the Android container.
Yes, I also hope to see the price go down.
Most of the people I’ve introduced to Linux don’t even use the shell. Beginner-friendly Linux distros are perfectly usable without ever touching a terminal, just as most people use Windows without ever touching PowerShell (or worse, the Registry Editor).
The FuriPhone, which runs the FuriOS Linux distribution (based on Debian), has a polished enough user experience that it can be used as a daily driver by many people.
And VSCodium is the project that releases builds from the VS Code source code. Privacy-conscious developers should use VSCodium (which is fully FOSS) instead of Visual Studio Code (which is partially proprietary and includes tracking).
About the technical part, Signal uses the Signal Protocol instead of RCS. (Google also uses the Signal Protocol to encrypt some RCS messages in Google Messages, but the Signal Protocol and RCS are not the same thing.)
Nintendo restricting game and app access on the Switch is also anticompetitive. However, Apple’s anticompetitive restrictions on iOS are a higher-priority problem because smartphones are essential communication devices while video game consoles are not.
Molly is a Signal client fork that uses UnifiedPush instead of Google’s push notification service.
That’s incorrect. GPL licenses are open source.
The GPL does not restrict anyone from selling or distributing GPL-licensed software as a component of an aggregate software distribution. For example, all Linux distributions contain GPL-licensed software, as the Linux kernel is GPLv2.
Software licenses that “discriminate against any person or group of persons” or “restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor” are not open source. Llama’s license doesn’t just restrict Llama from being used by companies with “700 million monthly active users”, it also restricts Llama from being used to “create, train, fine tune, or otherwise improve an AI model” or being used for military purposes (although Meta made an exception for the US military). Therefore, Llama is not open source.
If you are referring to licenses that prohibit commercial use or prevent certain types of users from using the software, those licenses are not open source because they “discriminate against any person or group of persons” or “restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor”.
For example, if a developer offers their software in a source-available “community” version that is restricted to non-commercial use and a proprietary “enterprise” version, neither the community version nor the enterprise version is open source. On the other hand, if a developer uses an open core licensing model by offering an open source “community” version and a proprietary “enterprise” version, the community version is open source while the enterprise version is not.
OnlyOffice recently added a top-notch PDF editor which I believe is the most fully-featured FOSS alternative to Adobe Acrobat right now. It’s available on Flathub.