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It's funny, because I had the opposite reaction: I found it a little bit distasteful that, while I'm sure the guy had a genuine desire to help, he's also using F-Droid's issue tracker as a means of advertising his product, as presumably there are other people who might see that issue report and have need for it, and become a paying customer.
(To be fair, this isn't brazen spam; the "ad" is targeted and offered in the spirit of help, and if they offer perpetual free usage for open source products, he's not trying to extract money from F-Droid. But still.)
> Why would you even both responding except to declare "I am better than thou?"
Maybe don't take the most uncharitable interpretation of something said by a random person on the internet who you don't know? Someone who at least has the bona-fide of volunteering their time to help keep a valuable open source project online? Perhaps the F-Droid project does actually have a stated policy of using open source hosting/monitoring tools, and he was genuinely asking in case he missed something, and would actually like to use that service if it is indeed open source.
I think it's pretty weird to assume good faith with the Oh Dear guy's advertisement, but assume the unpaid volunteer helping run F-Droid is a holier-than-thou prat. But hey, of course, capitalism and hustle are the most important things!
They're throwing stones in a glass house.
It's not like their purity gets them anywhere. Google is kicking open software (already hidden and scare walled) off their platform soon and nobody will have F-Droid without permission from Google.
It's better to be pragmatic and focus on the battles that matter. Like the one against Google.
It's better to be pragmatic. Agreed. The developer community needs to get its shit together if it wants to have carvouts compared to the other ~99.9999% of users.
It's 100% about power.
Imagine if websites were scare walled. If Microsoft had owned the Internet, that might have happened. Websites can do "scary" things, after all.
You can buy guns and knives and drive 60 miles per hour. You can give your banking information away. So many things scare the user less than Google does. Not to mention you have to go five settings deep to untick a setting to even enable it.
Again, I reiterate: It's 100% about power.
We should stop being afraid, we should stop trying to "protect the children", and we should stand up for our rights.
Please don't use epithets like this on HN, regardless of whether they're in the discussion here. The first words in the “In Comments” section of the guidelines are “Be Kind”. Please take care to do that in all comments on HN.
guns are regulated everywhere, even in places with very lax gun laws.
believe it or not, but ... cars are regulated too!
I agree that we should stop being afraid, and especially we should stop being inconsistent (claiming to protect kids while doing absolutely none of the things that have favorable cost-benefit ratio with regards to actual kid protection outcomes).
I 100% agree with standing up for our rights, functions, features and all that means ownership of computing devices.
And when the chips fall to the ground it means that Google et al. has the right to do whatever the fuck they want with their shit.
And adding all this up leads to the obvious conclusion that we need to put our money where our mind is. (And we need to spend it at places where they are more aligned with our interests.)