[echelon]

F-Droid is on a free tier of an open core, but not fully FOSS product. A product that is publicly listed on the stock exchange, at that!

They're throwing stones in a glass house.

It's not like their purity gets them anywhere. Google is kicking open software (already hidden and scare walled) off their platform soon and nobody will have F-Droid without permission from Google.

It's better to be pragmatic and focus on the battles that matter. Like the one against Google.

[jdiff]

F-Droid isn't throwing stones, that's someone entirely unaffiliated with the project. F-Droid's hosting and infrastructure makes use of many projects and products that are not FOSS.

[echelon]

Thank you for clarifying. I retract my prior statement in shame.

Whomever is saying this kind of stuff on behalf of a project they're unaffiliated with has some serious gall.

[pas]

Things are "scare walled" because things are scary. Just because something claims to be OSI-fucking-open-source doesn't mean anything.

It's better to be pragmatic. Agreed. The developer community needs to get its shit together if it wants to have carvouts compared to the other ~99.9999% of users.

[echelon]

> Things are "scare walled" because things are scary.

It's 100% about power.

Imagine if websites were scare walled. If Microsoft had owned the Internet, that might have happened. Websites can do "scary" things, after all.

You can buy guns and knives and drive 60 miles per hour. You can give your banking information away. So many things scare the user less than Google does. Not to mention you have to go five settings deep to untick a setting to even enable it.

Again, I reiterate: It's 100% about power.

We should stop being afraid, we should stop trying to "protect the children", and we should stand up for our rights.

[pas]

trade offs are real. you can't simply claim that regulation on sharp metal sticks is not something that exists. (China and the UK for example)

guns are regulated everywhere, even in places with very lax gun laws.

believe it or not, but ... cars are regulated too!

I agree that we should stop being afraid, and especially we should stop being inconsistent (claiming to protect kids while doing absolutely none of the things that have favorable cost-benefit ratio with regards to actual kid protection outcomes).

I 100% agree with standing up for our rights, functions, features and all that means ownership of computing devices.

And when the chips fall to the ground it means that Google et al. has the right to do whatever the fuck they want with their shit.

And adding all this up leads to the obvious conclusion that we need to put our money where our mind is. (And we need to spend it at places where they are more aligned with our interests.)