I don’t know if grouping disparate projects under the “community” label has any worthwhile benefit. Given the label is meant to classify related operating systems, the label should provide an accurate description of the basis of the system. A simpler solution would be to just say GNU/Linux is a subcategory of Linux (and maybe even sub-sub-categorize by package manager or init system or whatever makes the most sense). Similarly, I think Android and its derivatives are worthy of being its own classification of Linux operating system (as long as you don’t try to claim “it’s not real Linux” or whatever).

With regards to software compatibility, I think it’s rather the other way around - software written for “Linux” usually works on any POSIX operating system, and sometimes even Windows. Unless you’re talking about binary compatibility, which is meaningless in the Linux space anyway.

Why not also recognize systemd, or musl, or kde or gnome or any of the other millions of non GNU packages that are needed to make up a complete OS.

Unironically there might be some value in recognizing “systemd/Linux” as a subfamily of Linux operating systems.

And these days GNU makes up less and less of the core packages that most distros run anymore.

Linux makes up exactly one package on a so-called Linux system.

Not at all, really. Forking is fine and building a business off of it is fine (I don’t personally see the value in it but apparently Y Combinator saw fit to invest in this so what do I know). Where they fucked up was replacing the existing free software license with some “AI” generated mumbo jumbo, because they were “too busy building” to “bother with legal.”

You didn’t have to “bother” with creating a license, because there already was one. No one in free software should be rolling their own custom license (GPT generation aside) because there exist perfectly good ones already.

I’ll be “that guy”:

F-Droid is a software repository, not an app store. The distinction is subtle but important. A software repository offers a community-curated collection of software packages whereas an app store is just a marketplace for software developers to offer products to end-users. A software repository serves the interests of its community first, whereas an app store is merely a means for developers to sell products to end-users.

There are those who believe that F-Droid’s role as a “middle man” vetting and building packages from source instead of blindly shipping builds provided by upstream makes it a security risk, because you’re trusting F-Droid in addition to (some say instead of) the upstream developer. Perhaps telling is that none of these critics can offer an alternative solution.

Before anyone mentions Obtainium and Accrescent, these are not alternatives to F-Droid, they solve completely different problems.

Apple intentionally makes iPhone-Android interoperability crap in order to sell iPhones. That’s not conspiracy theorizing, Tim Apple blatantly admitted to it.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/7/23342243/tim-cook-apple-rcs-imessage-android-iphone-compatibility

This is why the marketing around flatpak bothers me. It’s touted as some kind of “universal Linux package manager” but Linux is just a kernel - all the stuff that apps depend on comes with the distro. So, in order for flatpaks to be “distro independent” they basically have to supply all the stuff that normally comes from the distro - effectively building a second distro on top of your existing one.

Nix and Guix are the same but at least I think they’re more up front that they are effectively distros that can run on top of your existing distro or as a standalone operating system directly on top of Linux.

FUTO changing the definition of open source to suit their business model is like that time US Congress decided that pizza was a vegetable because it has tomato sauce.

FUTO’s EULA may superficially resemble a true free software license (and may be good enough for you, personally) but it fundamentally undermines core tenets of the free software movement in order to preserve their business interests. All pseudo-FOSS licenses (whether of the “ethical” or the “business” variety) do this, because they prioritize the interests of the rightsholder above those of the community and the user. If important free software projects like Linux and Firefox were released under this license the free software world as we know it would not be possible.

As proprietary licenses go, it’s certainly far from the worst.

Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. It is perfectly legal and ethical to sell free software. Keep in mind if you’re using third party code (whether it’s libraries or external contributions to your application) you must abide by the terms of whatever license it is under, this is whether it’s paid or gratis.

It’s even perfectly legal to fork an existing free software project and sell it on the play store, although whether that is ethical or not is up for debate - depending on what efforts you put into your fork before selling it, an orthodox Stallmanist might have no problem with it but the original developer(s) of that code may perceive this as “theft.” Keep in mind you must abide by the terms of whatever license the project is under, so if it is a copyleft license like the GNU GPL you must either provide corresponding source code or an offer for such.

Assuming they own the copyright (which I believe they do, since they were able to relicense it to begin with) they can absolutely offer it under a dual licensing arrangement even if the licenses are incompatible. It would only be an issue if other peoples’ AGPLv3 licensed code was in there, but as it is not the only copyright they would theoretically be violating is their own, which is literally not possible.

Dual licensing under a free software license and proprietary EULA is a common business model, especially when the free software license is a strong copyleft like the AGPL, since the proprietary licensors do not have to abide by certain conditions that free license users have to.

When one asks if something is free software (a.k.a. FOSS) the concern isn’t so much trust but rather can one view, modify, and share the program. Sandboxes solve a different problem.

In the case of a javascript bundle, in order for a user to exercise the Four Freedoms they must at minimum be provided with corresponding source code for each component in the bundle, and preferably some way in the browser for the user to inspect and modify it. In other words, it must be treated like any other compiled binary program. A lock file with specific versions probably isn’t necessary (and server configuration and source code definitely isn’t).

You are right in that this would require cooperation from the service provider to provide this metadata, and most definitely would not do this. Therefore, such an extension as OP suggests would have the effect of blocking the vast majority of javascript on the web today. LibreJS tries to some extent but I don’t know how well it can handle bundled javascript files.

No opinion on OSMand but Magic Earth is proprietary which is a deal breaker for me.

Aseprite is proprietary, but so is this. There is LibreSprite though.

I feel like there’s a lot of FUD around this subject, because people bring it up as if it’s purely a negative without talking about the reasons why it’s done the way it is. The whole point of F-Droid is that it’s a repository (not a store) of free software applications. They have an inclusion policy forbidding proprietary code and dependencies, and in order to enforce this policy they have to build from publicly available source code, and in order to do so they need to sign the builds themselves. This means, yes, you are trusting F-Droid instead of the upstream developer - but given F-Droid has higher standards than upstream developers this is a tradeoff I am willing to make.

Reproducible builds solves this in a way that preserves the standards of F-Droid, however, “security peoples’” favored “alternatives” (such as Accrescent, Obtainium, and Google Play Store/Aurora Store) forego this entirely, showing they don’t either have a viable solution to offer or that they don’t really care about the problem that F-Droid is addressing to begin with.

Unironically one of the greatest people in the technology space of the last 40 years, in the sense of accomplishments and impact on the world. I’m talking specifically about the free software movement, copyleft, and the GNU GPL. The world would be a much worse place without those accomplishments. The fact that a lot of his life’s work is erroneously attributed to the kernel guy doesn’t change that.

As a thinker, absolutely brilliant and unfortunately misunderstood. He espouses radical ideas about the relation of users to the technology they use that are still relevant to issues of today (e.g. enshittification, planned obsolescence, surveillance capitalism, and so on). It goes far beyond “you can look at source code to see if there’s bugs or spyware in it.” There’s a reason “Stallman was right” is a meme.

As a leader and a figurehead I’m not convinced he’s as effective. Regardless of the coordinated smear campaign from a few years ago (in which it was erroneously said “he defended Jeffrey Epstein” or “he blamed Epstein’s victim” or some such), he has demonstrated behaviors that alienate people and people who have worked for/with him (e.g. FSF employees and GNU maintainers) have said he is not a good boss. His comment about “voluntary pedophilia” is inexcusable, even though he has said he no longer stands by it. The Epstein association was fabricated from a quote taken out of context, but I don’t think it was wise to even join that discussion. The glibc manual abort() joke incident from 2018 is probably what convinced me of this - not so much that the joke is bad (humor is subjective) but that multiple developers objected to it and said it made them uncomfortable, yet he “pulled rank” and insisted it be left in (although as of now it seems to be absent). I believe his intentions were good (the “joke” isn’t actually about abortion as such, but rather the US government “global gag rule” suppressing discussions of such) but forcing it in against the protests of the community was inappropriate in my opinion.

Overall despite the above I feel he’s done more good than harm to the world, however, I’m not sure how much more good he can do in his position. I feel like the term “Stallmanism” would be an apt term for his thought but because of the above I feel leery associating myself with the guy.

To be clear, it used to be fully free software, then became proprietary for a little while, and then as of 17 June 2024 it became free again. So the most recent release 11.15.0 (from two days ago) is fully free, but the previous one isn’t.

“Privacy centric” is irrelevant because because this is the free software movement, not the privacy movement (also, this is not reddit, we have a higher standard of conduct here).

Further reading on free software philosophy. Most relevant is why software should not have owners (1994) as this is fundamentally where FUTO disagrees with the open source/free software movement.

I also made a prior comment here about the fundamental difference between “fauxpen source” licenses like FUTO’s and real FOSS licenses. You seem to characterize it as “stealing code and profiting off it” but the strength of free software is in collaboration and community, not so much competition, so sharing is considered a virtue here. I talked more about it here in a reddit comment referencing my previous lemmy comment.

This will probably be my last comment on FUTO/Grayjay in this thread, since I’ve said all I intend to say several times here and on reddit. I might make a master post about the problems of fauxpen source at some point.

I don’t have any opinion on grayjay but this is the open source community and grayjay is proprietary. That’s the only reason I downvoted your comment

Feel free to use it if it works for you but I think it’s poor form to advertise proprietary products in a thread about a free software project.

My guess (and it’s only a guess, I haven’t looked at the source code) is that the scraping is being done on a server end that they can update without having to push an app update.

edit: my guess was wrong, I found where the source code is and they do the parsing locally - however it’s a plugin that I assume gets loaded in on app start so they can still update it without having to publish a new apk. this is the fix

interestingly although Grayjay itself is proprietary this plugin is Affero GPL licensed.

Vivaldi’s target audience is people who don’t mind proprietary blobs as long as they are “good” or make things “work better.” Given that Vivaldi itself is essentially a proprietary blob combined with a Chromium backend this makes sense.