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by jraph 870 days ago
Indeed. I'm fine with HN though. I'm not the one running the non free code. One can browse it and participate to it without running any proprietary software. It works without JS, and the JS code is trivially small anyway. There are open source clients too. That's a pass for me. The day this changes, you won't see me here anymore.

That would correspond to the NonFreeNet antifeature in F-Droid [1].

They could update the code they released for good measure though [2].

Running Discord is on another level for me. I would consider accessing a Discord using a Matrix or IRC bridge.

[1] https://f-droid.org/docs/Anti-Features/#NonFreeNet

[2] https://github.com/wting/hackernews
2 comments
badpun 870 days ago
So you'd be against running a modern commercial video game on your machine, but you'd play it if it was running in a Google datacenter, and transmited the rendered pixels to you via Google Stadia?
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jraph 870 days ago
No. I would call this process "open source laundering".

Actually, that's kinda an issue I see with those bridges and why I'm not totally comfortable with them. Now, if the bridge is run by the people who set up the closed communication tool in the first place, that's a grey area. That makes them run an open protocol / standard with proprietary software, which is better than nothing. I'm okay with having to reach a proprietary network with some free software. Should I join an XMPP network run with a proprietary implementation that I wouldn't probably even know about it, but at least it has usable open source implementations. That's my take. I would be happier if we could just skip the Discord and use the real thing though.

But you know, I would be fine with you considering I'm not completely coherent. I'm not indeed. I have thresholds higher than those of RMS which makes me less coherent than him on this topic.

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pona-a 869 days ago
Hmm... Would a Discord custom client be considered libre enough? They officially see them as a violation of ToS but do not interfere unless they use too much bandwidth. Or would private/semi-private non-encrypted communications place it in another category?
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