Hans-Christoph Steiner @eighthave@librem.one

I see a shift in how people think about #privacy in #software. Now that people are aware of how bad software can be for privacy, I see a lot of pressure to not include useful functions because they might appear to be invading privacy. #Android permissions are a good example: so many people are rightly concerned about location tracking, as represented by location permissions. The first question is ask when seeing a suspicious one is: do I trust that app's people and process to do the right thing?

Now given that this strategy was conceived and driven by #BillGates, I see no way he can be trusted to do anything but the same in any of his endeavors. That is his clear track record over decades. His "charity" work is also driven my #monopoly mentality, and often directly tied to his investments. Like he's investing in #nuclear and giving "charity" money to promote it as a solution to #ClimateChange .

What is #Microsoft actually good at? Going thru their key products, it is clear they don't create new paradigms, they make often buggy implementations of ideas from other people: #BASIC #MSDOS #Windows #Word #Excel #browser #Bing #Cloud #dotnet. One thing they are clearly good is building a #monopoly. So it seems what they are good at is seeing good ideas, "embrace and extend" to control it, then building monopoly profiteering.

"it’s becoming all too clear that this new tech will be used in the same ways as the last generation of digital tools: that what begins with lofty promises about spreading freedom and democracy ends up micro targeting ads at us so that we buy more useless, carbon-spewing stuff"

There are lots of promises of good around #AI #GPT #LLM etc. This all is being developed by the same owners, people and culture of #BigTech and #SiliconValley that announced "privacy is dead" and that they are "making the world a better place". They aim to disrupt whatever they can to become wealthier from it. That is what #VentureCapital is all about. Even if this tech is a good idea, the forces driving it now have a proven track record of decades of causing harm
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/08/ai-machines-hallucinating-naomi-klein

A pattern popularized by the #SiliconValley is taking innovative social ideas, and building structures where wealthiest portion of society gets to live them, leaving everyone else behind. #OpenSource is a great example of this. Kubernetes is a case in point: it is built collaboratively by a bunch of #BigTech competitors, they are enjoying the benefits of #UserFreedom and #FreeSoftware, but for their users, they stick them with #tracking and proprietary lock in.

It turns out that #Bitwarden is not yet included in @fdroidorg because of the difficulty of confirming that #Xamarin setups are fully #FreeSoftware. We welcome help here, to unlock lots of apps built with Xamarin. https://gitlab.com/fdroid/rfp/-/issues/114

Jean-Baptiste Kempf on earning a living with #FreeSoftware:

"Money can restrict you. Of course you need a decent income, but you’re programming, you’re a developer in one of the most active industries, where there is virtually no unemployment, you’re going to be earning enough no matter what city you’re based in. Sure, more money would be fun, but most of the people I know who have more money are annoying. And if it makes you a slave to your work, what good is that?" https://www.welcometothejungle.com/en/articles/kempf-interview-vlc-videolan

So the #Bitwarden ad on this #FLOSSWeekly episode says: "Bitwarden doesn't track your data, only crash reporting, and even that is removed in the F-Droid installation." at around 16:30 https://twit.tv/shows/floss-weekly/episodes/720

Maybe not a big deal, but it seems like a new level for #FDroid: people paying money to promote based on F-Droid's principals, in this case, opt-out data collection is tracking.

One of the things that has become clearer to me over my three decades of work with #software as a student, at big companies, universities, startups, and doing grant funded development: #FreeSoftware is about freedom for the user of the software, while #OpenSource is mainly about freedom to make money with software. This struck me when listening to how much #Amazon loves Open Source https://www.redhat.com/en/code-comments-podcast/amazon-web-services-open-principles