Captain Beyond @ beyond @linkage.ds8.zone

Caretaker of Sunhillow/DS8.ZONE. Free (Libre) Software enthusiast and promo

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4 yr. ago

You can see what Fennec removes or patches out compared to upstream Firefox:

https://gitlab.com/relan/fennecbuild/-/blob/master/fenix-liberate.patch

https://gitlab.com/relan/fennecbuild/-/blob/master/gecko-liberate.patch

https://gitlab.com/relan/fennecbuild/-/blob/master/prebuild.sh?ref_type=heads

It should be noted, some so-called tracker detectors will find false positives for various proprietary libraries that are "stubbed out" - that is, the interfaces are still there but they have been replaced with empty functions that do nothing.

According to the tracking antifeature on Fennec, it "Connects to various Mozilla services that can track users." SkewedZeppelin (former Mull maintainer) lists some of these in this post. I should be clear that none of these are "trackers" but they are unsolicited connections to Mozilla services that could be used to track users.

I don't know about Ironfox, as far as I know Mull was based on Fennec F-Droid and Ironfox claims to be a continuation of that project, but I can't tell how close Ironfox is to Fennec nowadays.

It absolutely is. WSL literally runs Linux in a virtual machine.

I don't use brew but I do use Guix on top of PopOS, for most of the same reasons I use Guix System as a daily driver distro on my other machines. The PopOS install is meant to act as a "Windows replacement" so it has proprietary drivers, Steam, etc. For anything that's not a system package I get it from Guix if possible, because I prefer Guix's package management and its commitment to software freedom.

On Windows I use Scoop which has a handful of similarities in terms of user package management.

From a technical or legal perspective, copyright infringement is not theft. The relationship a copyright holder has with a work is of a completely different character than actual ownership. See Dowling v. United States (1985).

Whether or not "AI" training constitutes copyright infringement is, as far as I know, still up in the air. And, while I believe most of us can agree that actual theft is unethical, the ethics of copyright infringement are as far as I know also very debatable.

Disclaimer - not an uncritical supporter of "AI."

I think F-droid is woefully misunderstood especially in privacy circles.

The main benefit of F-Droid is that it works (as best it can) to guarantee software freedom. This means, for each app, you can be assured it is under a free software license, built from corresponding source code, and contains no proprietary components. F-droid has an inclusion policy that forbids proprietary blobs and they have to build everything from source in order to ensure that - however, if the app is reproducible, F-droid can actually verify that the already built app from the developer satisfies the inclusion policy without needing to sign its own builds, which is ideal. It's important to note that without building from source, there is no way to guarantee that the source corresponds to the binary, which is important for exercising the four freedoms.

I don't agree with everything F-droid does and I don't think F-droid is perfect. The security folks have a few valid points, I think, but they fail to offer a solution that solves the same problem that F-droid does, either because they misunderstand what problem that is, or simply do not care about it. F-droid is not an app store, it's a community-maintained distribution like a GNU/Linux distribution. App stores are not alternatives to F-droid and serve different problems. There is, as far as I know, no other project that attempts to serve the same purpose as F-droid.

No. This isn't a thing. Don't try to make it a thing.

Once something leaves your computer you lose control of it. The recipient can do whatever they want with the message. If you don't trust the recipient not to be malicious then don't send them anything sensitive. You can't untell a secret.

Proprietary software in general, Discord and Twitter in specific

Guix is currently hosted on FSF infrastructure and, as another commenter pointed out, is in the process of migrating to Codeberg. It has never been on Github.

microG replaces the Play services application on your device, but it's still going to be dependent on Google servers if you are using push notifications. There's no way around that unless the app supports a non-Google alternative such as UnifiedPush or even just a web socket.

smart tab groups, a new AI-powered feature that suggests names and groups based on the tabs you have open.

Yeah sure ok. Did the community ask for this too?

open source, but not free

Free here means free-as-in-freedom. The free software definition and open source definition are almost identical, there are very few apps that are only one or the other.

It's the free software movement, though - the four freedoms are literally the cornerstone of the movement. They're not simply a "nice to have" they're the bare minimum of what we should ask for. If we promote non-free "alternatives" we are saying that these basic freedoms are not an expectation, but are optional and negotiable - we are moving the message away from the four freedoms and towards "evil" proprietary applications, while making exceptions for the "lesser evil" ones.

When I say Obsidian is non-free I am not saying Obsidian is evil or you are not allowed to use it. As non-free apps go Obsidian is probably one of the least-worst, as you and many others point out it is just a markdown editor so there is no vendor lock in or weird proprietary format. I am simply saying, this is a movement focused on "the four freedoms" and Obsidian does not meet those four very basic criteria.

Proprietary software is proprietary no matter how "nice" it is. It should not be advertised in FOSS communities and falsely presenting it as "FOSS adjacent" is harmful to the movement IMO.

There are many places so called "good proprietary apps" can be promoted and discussed.

Plenty of people who (I assume) are smarter than Trump don't understand that FOSS refers to freedom, not price. It's not a very good term and I don't like how widely used it is now.

The one that says that Android is Linux therefore every Android device is a Linux phone (or tablet, etc).

This is often dismissed as a technicality but as every thread on so-called "mobile Linux" demonstrates, so-called "Linux phones" are judged basically on how well they can run Android crapware... just as "desktop Linux" is more or less judged solely on how well it can run Windows apps. Unlike Windows, however, Android is open source(-ish) and already a Linux operating system.

Most people who want to "switch to Linux" don't actually care about Linux, they just want Windows that doesn't suck. I imagine most people who want "mobile Linux" similarly want a non-sucky Android... which actually exists, unlike Windows.

If what you want is "Mobile Linux that can run Android apps" go install GrapheneOS or LineageOS or whatever.

This is not so much an "ActivityPub problem" as it is just how things work when you move something from point A to point B. You can't unsend an email (or physical mail) or untell a secret.

The idea that you can just delete something on a whim is an illusion created by the centralized silo networks, and it's not even true those cases as it's generally a soft delete, and archived by other means anyway.

A human using a browser feature/extension you personally disapprove of does not make them a bot. Once your content is inside my browser I have the right to disrespect it as I see fit.

Not that I see much value in "AI summaries" of course - but this feels very much like the "adblocking is theft" type discourse of past years.

"linux phone"

Don't make me tap the sign

Thunderbird and Firefox are developed by separate companies (both under the Mozilla Foundation). Thunderbird is funded through donations. Firefox is funded through (among other sources, such as Pocket and advertisements) the Google search deal. As far as I know it's not legally feasible (or even possible) for the Firefox money to go to Thunderbird or vice versa.

Linux is the kernel, so the userspace is irrelevant. And I'm not sure what the exact amount of Linux you can change before it is no longer Linux, but it's Linux enough to run entire desktop environments.