Captain Beyond

russian proprietary software

The “Russian” part is not the problem here

Isn’t this proprietary?

What makes Sailfish OS unique over competitors like GrapheneOS and e/OS is that it’s not based on the Android Open Source Project, but Linux.

Not only are AOSP and its derivatives also based on Linux, they are actually free software unlike Sailfish OS which contains some amount of proprietary code (I know at least the Android compatibility layer - which I’m told isn’t simply the AOSP runtime (as Waydroid uses) but some proprietary thing).

s/Linux/systemd/g

Ironically though this makes the reverse a bit more defensible (i.e. using an LLM to reverse engineer a proprietary app) because that proprietary app’s source code is less likely to be among the publicly available dataset.

But I imagine the corpos aren’t going to look fondly on that for obvious reasons.

I think the fact that the maintainer is intimately knowledgeable about the original codebase is enough for it to not be a clean room re-implementation, no? That’s what makes it “clean”

I’ll go through and evaluate the freeness of each item on this list at some point however we’re already not off to a great start - Build engine unfortunately is non-free.

https://github.com/vogonsorg/BuildGDX/blob/master/buildlic.txt

I feel like listing copyright infringement next to actual harms is sort of an “arson, murder, and jaywalking” moment.

But yes, I wouldn’t mind banning discussion of this nonsense as well.

You wouldn’t download a car

Hallucinations, but also not helped by the fact that people (knowingly or not) promote proprietary garbage in FOSS communities. I remember the “reddit answers” feature when I tried it out frequently suggested proprietary crap in “list of best FOSS” type topics.

I always had the impression that the free software idea had a stronger presence in Europe (and, generally, non-Anglo areas) and have generally chalked that up to the fact that the ambiguity of free (as in freedom)/free (as in beer) largely does not exist outside of English. Note that “open” is every bit as ambiguous as “free” here - i’ve had way too many arguments with people who thought “open” just means you can look at the source code (imagine thinking that a store was “open” just because you can look through the window and see products).

However IMO the author goes a bit too far in presenting free software seemingly as some sort of uniquely European concept - he seems to suggest that the creation of Linux came about entirely out of thin air, and almost reads to me like Linus Torvalds originated the idea of copyleft - with no mention whatsoever of the American GNU project upon whose shoulders he stands. Allegedly he was inspired by a talk Richard Stallman gave at his university in 1990.

https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch09.html

Edit: Git also did not come out of thin air, Linux developers were using a proprietary (American) VCS in the beginning, under a gratis license specifically granted for Linux development. The Australian developer Andrew Tridgell is arguably the person most responsible for inciting the development of git, as the proprietary VCS developer withdrew the gratis licenses once he developed a free tool which could interoperate with the proprietary servers.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/mcvoy.html

(That proprietary tool is now licensed under the Apache 2.0 license, but as far as I know no one uses it anymore)

Sure, but note that free in this case refers to the four freedoms. If something has a usage restriction it is non-free by definition as it fails the first criterion.

Open core licensing models achieve this by offering the main product as a free software project and then selling proprietary add-ons specifically targeted towards enterprises. Or, if it’s a library/framework/infrastructure tool, dual license under a strong copyleft like (A)GPLv3 and paid enterprise license.

I disagree with this take. As someone who feels entitled to the four freedoms with every program I run, proprietary is a dealbreaker. Crypto and “AI” crap can be disabled or removed. If the choice were strictly between Vivaldi and Brave, Brave would be the better option. Fortunately we have better choices.

I don’t use Brave, I use Librewolf (or Ungoogled-Chromium if I need Chromium). I suggested that a “debraved” browser might be the best chromium browser, but apparently Helium is close to this (I haven’t heard of it until today).

Vivaldi being proprietary makes it worse than Brave, even with Brave’s controversies. But I would still rather use Librewolf, but there is even Ungoogled-Chromium if you really need it.

There is definitely a space for a “deBraved” browser that keeps the good parts. That would be the best chromium browser.

This is a proprietary extension for a proprietary “service as a software substitute” program living on someone else’s computer. It’s about the furthest from free software/open source as you can get

Vivaldi is proprietary garbage hyped up by privacy redditors and degooglers. No I don’t care how “private” it is and I don’t care that they’re worried about competitors “stealing” their work (which is, ironically, built on free software). I don’t care about its connection to Opera or that it’s European based. Proprietary is proprietary.

There are plenty of good enough free browsers. Ungoogled Chromium exists if you don’t want Firefox.

Haven’t used it, but generally I don’t prefer hardened browsers. IMO the tradeoffs aren’t worth it, personally.

People promoting proprietary software, which directly goes against the rules and purpose of this community

As the article notes they are planning to invest 9 million euros in the transition, so they clearly don’t expect it to be “free of cost.” The difference is paying 15 million euros to license some proprietary American product, versus investing 9 million euros in the free software world.

Interesting detail - the word filter is a per-instance side thing. On a foreign instance I can see the original word.

(I don’t have a problem with the intent of the filter but I kind of expected that the s-thorpe problem had been fixed by now)