Captain Beyond

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)

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Ultimately it’s your work so it’s up to you how you want to release it. BSD/MIT aren’t really any more or less free than the GPL because they still guarantee the four freedoms. The GPL just prevents downstream projects from denying those four freedoms further down stream, which is seen as important in the free software movement, but it doesn’t have to be to you.

One thing to keep in mind with these permissive or “pushover” type licenses although they are free software licenses, normalizing them means that the proprietary software industry ultimately gets to choose what is allowed to be released as free software. There is a warning that “business friendly” free software licensing does not ultimately mean business will be friendly back, especially in an age where there is increasing concern over proprietary software companies taking advantage without either giving back nor funding upstream projects.

I do not believe FUTO’s campaign to redefine open source has had a positive effect on the open source movement, given all the confusion it has caused. Maybe its “ownership” of Immich has had a positive effect on Immich, but I wouldn’t know.

It is worth noting, according to Louis Rossmann, he stopped working for FUTO in early 2025 (“almost a year ago”). Here is his response to this article. Posting for information not because I agree with him. I still think Silicon Valley billionaire Eron Wolf-in-sheeps-clothing is a shady character for trying to redefine open source.

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.

Open-source software (FOSS preferred)

FYI, there isn’t really such a thing as “OSS but not FOSS.” The free software definition and the open source definition mostly overlap. Anything that is free software is almost always open source and vice versa.

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)

“more repos = more apps out of the box” sounds nice in theory but IMO this is more of a downside than it might appear. Having a bunch of repos enabled out of the box means you have to be more careful about which repo offers what app and some apps are even offered in multiple repos. I got bit by this when I installed an app from IzzyOnDroid instead of F-Droid by accident.

With F-Droid you get the baseline repo that has high standards and then you can opt in to having additional repos that may have different or lower standards. Having those extra repos enabled by default may give a false reassurance that those other repos also conform to F-Droid’s standards, or that those other apps are “in F-Droid” when really they’re in IzzyOnDroid or some other third party repo. I’ve seen enough instances of that and there are a few even in this thread.

Note that, although (AFAIK) the Accrescent client is free software, it’s hardcoded to only support their own store which last I checked had no guarantee that it only offers free software. Its marketing seemed to rely a lot on spreading FUD about F-Droid even though it fundamentally serves a different purpose than F-Droid.

This thread is specifically about Android apps, so maybe the better suggestion would be “Fennec F-Droid”

Do you mean F-Droid Basic? F-Droid Classic is a fork, that hasn’t been updated in several years

They may be talking about F-Droid Basic