Captain Beyond @ beyond @linkage.ds8.zone

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

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4 yr. ago

Unfortunately a lot of this seems in reponse to Midori, a seemingly hostile fork with a pretty suspcious website.

To some people all forks are hostile. This appears to be such a case. He just seems to be sour over people exercising the same freedoms he got from Mozilla upstream. Rules for thee but not for me. The free software community doesn't need his obscure fork.

With Unison syncing is a manual process, I run it and it tells me what's changed on each side and I can make changes as appropriate. Syncthing is a bit too automatic for my taste and its conflict resolution is a bit more involved.

They do say that

They will be using a different repository with a different license for some of its new features

"different license" suggests to me it might be a proprietary/fauxpen source licene, since this is explicitly being done to punish a fork.

I use the Unison file sync tool to keep backups of all my important files on flash drives and servers. For mobile devices I do use Syncthing because MTP is painfully slow and taking the SD card out of the device to plug it in is too much of a hassle, but I would rather use Unison.

Fauxpen source licenses (both of the "business" variety as well as the so-called "ethical" variety) have a fatal flaw: they prioritize the interests of the rightsholder over that of the community or the user. They are thus not so different than a standard proprietary EULA in concept, even if they are more permissive.

The reason this is an issue is because it inhibits code reuse. True free software licenses don't privilege the interests of the rightsholder any more than copyright law already does, because in the free software movement the developer is just a fellow user/member of the community. In other words, the GPL is the GPL is the GPL no matter who the rightsholder of the GPL code is. This means that code from many different rightsholders can be mixed together into a single program with no issue. Linux, of course, is probably the biggest example of this.

I prefer to use, where possible, the term "software freedom." This keeps the focus on the four freedoms enjoyed by the users.

If I need an adjective, I'll prefer libre, then free. "Libre" has the disadvantage of not being a native English word, but it has relatives such as liberate or liberty, so it's not too much of a stretch. "Free" has the disadvantage of being misconstrued as meaning free-of-cost, but this can be explained away.

"Open source" is problematic for several reasons. Firstly, "open source" is just as easy to misconstrue as "free" is - it can be misconstrued as "you can look at the source code" and many companies and organizations actively take advantage of this misconception. Also, "open source" puts the focus on source code, with the idea that having more developers with access to the code makes the program better technologically. This claim is debatable, but putting the focus on the source code makes it seem like open source only matters to developers and is simply irrelevant to those who don't have the want or ability to use the source code. However, even non-developers can avail themselves of freedoms 0 and 2, and can hire other people or make use of the community to exercise freedoms 1 and 4. Sometimes, open source is misunderstood to refer to the community-based development model that is more properly known as the "bazaar model."

"FOSS" and "FLOSS" are problematic for similar reasons as "free" above: they are very easily misconstrued to mean "free of cost and also open source" (whether open source means actual open source or simply "can view the source code"). It's not uncommon for something to be described as "not OSS but free" for example.

For non-libre software I tend to just say proprietary. I'll sometimes say non-free or non-libre, but non-free and closed source have the same problems as free and open source.

Although I’m a firm supporter of free software

Unless I'm misreading this, your argument seems to be that software freedom is irrelevant in the face of technical superiority or popularity. That's exactly the opposite of "firm support" in my view.

I'll offer a counterpoint to the "best tool for the job" thing: before git existed, Linux development relied on a proprietary VCS called Bitkeeper. Licenses for Bitkeeper were "graciously" donated for gratis by the Bitkeeper developer. Andrew Tridgell, who was not party to the Bitkeeper EULA, telneted to a Bitkeeper server and typed "help". The Bitkeeper developer, in retaliation, revoked the Linux developers' gratis license to use the proprietary "best tool for the job." This was what forced Linus to develop git, which became the most widely used VCS in the free software world. (read: Thank You, Larry McVoy by Richard Stallman)

Proprietary tools can seem to be useful in the moment but developing a dependency on them, and encouraging their use, is dangerous. Discord might seem like "the best tool for the job" until it enshittifies, just like its predecessors did, and just like its successors inevitably will. We've seen it happen often enough.

Grayjay is proprietary. https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2023/10/18/grayjay-is-not-open-source/

I dont have a better one though.

I just say non-Android Linux systems. GNU/Linux if I'm talking about that type of system, but there are some like postmarketOS that are strictly not in that group (it's based on Alpine)

I had hopes we could rise above reddit brain, but you can't take the reddit out of the redditor so easily.

"Android isn't Linux," of course. This is a very obviously false myth that is debunked very easily by simply looking at any Android device or the source code. It is not a myth spread by people who are technologically literate. Yet, this easily verifiable fact upsets Linux fans so much they resort to downvotes and ugly language (I have my ideas why, but it's probably a waste of time to elaborate in this thread).

Of course, the more savvy among the Linux fandom will admit that Android "contains Linux, but isn't real Linux" - but "real Linux" is yet another myth; that is, the myth that there is more to Linux than an operating system kernel, a myth that leads to further myths such as the myth of fragmentation, or the myth that distributions are worthless and we need a "unified app store." It's a myth that clouds history and assigns the wrong motives to the wrong people and meanings to things that don't need or deserve them (the misunderstanding that that "Linux" is "about openness" or "against corporations" for example, when large companies are the main contributors to and users of the Linux project). Linus Torvalds himself says he only cares about code, not about freedom or openness or any of that stuff (that's Richard Stallman's thing)

The fact that this myth is widely believed is not relevant. We don't live in a world where a falsehood becomes true if it is widely believed; people used to believe the sun revolved around the earth, for example. Also, a falsehood being widely believed doesn't mean it deserves to stay unchallenged.

The point of reminding Linux fans that Android is based on their beloved kernel isn't meant to be a well-actually or anything. It's a reminder that much of what a so called "Linux phone" can do is already possible without having to switch to an operating system that in many respects is not ready for general use. For example, you can run xfce in Termux - I hope this is enough to disabuse one of the silly notion of "not real Linux." For some reason. people looking for so-called "Linux phones" desire Android compatibility, and it turns out that because Android itself is Linux, it is far easier for Android to run so-called "Linux apps" than it is for so-called "mobile Linux" to run Android apps.

Android is Linux and that's a good thing. I should point out that it's not my preferred Linux operating system - I was a Pinephone early adopter and used to daily drive Mobian, I would prefer that or GNU Guix over Android. Still, not only is it a Linux based operating system, it also has its own rich free software ecosystem backed by F-Droid. It's very usable once you cut out the Google crap and stick to free software only (or as much as possible).

I wrote more on the "real Linux" myth here in case anyone's interested in more reading material.

According to Wikipedia there are two versions of unrar, a free one which supports older versions of RAR, and the proprietary RARLab one that supports newer versions.

There's also a tool called The Unarchiver that supports RARv5 although it has been bought out and is currently proprietary, the free version is still available. Theoretically it could be used to provide RAR decompression for apps such as this one.

It is repeated in every single damn “Linux phone” thread

Good. The more people pushing back against falsehoods, the better.

I think GNU Guix System scratches all my itches:

• Committed to being 100% free software even at the kernel level (I know this is controversial)
• Focus on reproducible builds
• Atomic updates that can be rolled back if something breaks
• A package manager that makes it relatively easy to package software (there are importer commands that can import from language-specific package managers such as pip and cargo) and makes it possible, as a user, to apply transforms to packages (i.e. build with X commit or with Y patch)
• Per-user profiles (in addition to the root profile and the system profile) allowing user to install software without requiring root. Users can even create separate profiles as well as throwaway profiles for running scripts or one-off commands (i.e. a python or bash script can use guix shell as its interpreter listing all the packages it requires).

Previously I used Ubuntu from 2008 to 2009, Trisquel from 2009 to 2014, and Debian from 2014 to 2019.

Software freedom is about what you, the user, run on your own hardware. Different concerns apply to server software. The client side is what matters as that's what you run on your hardware, but if the server side is free as well then you are not tied to the service provider and can use a different service provider or run your own instance.

With server software, the main concern is "Service as a Software Substitute" - doing your computing on "cloud" (someone else's computer). See Who does that server really serve?.

Android is Linux.

This should be repeated in every "Linux phone" thread.

It's also possible to install a full GNU userland using Termux, and nowadays a graphical interface is even possible with Termux.

The point of software freedom is, and has been for the last 40 years, the four freedoms. Replacing proprietary software with a free alternative is always worth it, in my opinion.

Sure, ideally the entire operating system would be replaced with a free alternative, but not everyone is willing or able to make such a big change right out of the gate. Windows users deserve freedom, too. The FSF calls this "climbing the freedom ladder".

Note that this is not related to the "Simple" suite of apps that got bought out by an adware company. There are a few apps on F-Droid that use the term "simple" despite not being connected to the "Simple" suite.

The built in firewall is proprietary, which is enough of a reason to prefer a free software alternative.

This is an unfortunate misunderstanding that I try to do my best to fight back against - but the people I'm talking about in this community are well aware they're in a free software community and disregard that fact because they personally don't care about software freedom. Which is their right, of course - but it's disrespectful for them to come into our spaces and push that.

Some of them are prominent members of privacy communities who come into here with a personal vendetta against imagined "FOSS zealots" so they become "anti-FOSS zealots" in our own spaces. Unfortunately I've seen this behavior from self-described privacy enthusiasts so often that I've started to automatically distrust said people.