Perfectly concise 
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the most scary thing happens when prominent Orthodox seminar schools use Google online “services” for education purposes of young-adults.
I mean you would understand the confusion and obscurity in pagan-technology-users but it is significantly harder to understand HOW the director of a Christian school would openly praise such online services and asociate them with the INTERNET itself on the OFFICIAL radio channel of the Church at peak audience hours and a PRIEST moderator agrees with such practices.
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I think the most significant part in that post is the second part of the title; so say we all.
We. All.
How do we all, as users or more, contribute to these circumstances or otherwise allow these circumstances to be present? What can we do - or what needs to be done - so that this is not the case?
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I totally agree with this guy.
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I think part of this all spawned from so many jumping in with both feet early-on, coming to rely on the services for daily life, be it work or education. Some of it is simply convenience that is required for today’s face-paced life. There aren’t many alternatives to Google. While there are some, they aren’t something the average bear can use because it doesn’t just work.
So, what can we do? All we can do is to move away from the services. We have to stop feeding the monsters. Even then, they are so big at this point, I do not see them ever going away. Facebook and Google were founded with government money via In-Q-Tel, Amazon has big government contracts, etc.
If you are capable of using FOSS privacy-respecting alternatives, willing to invest the time and effort into learning about them, etc. More power to you.
I say, people got on fine for a long time without being connected all the time, and that is the route I took for myself.
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I think the knowing part is really a big deal.
And also the many-things-under-one-umbrella part.
Like with LibremOne.
Or Framasoft.
And now they have a crowdfunder to get event-planning off of facebook.
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you are mostly right except “they” are starting to get to us with-this-beeing-online-makes-you-a-target-crap. beeing online is not the problem here because the internet was founded on principles of cooperation and good will among scientists and generally the brightest minds. the problem started with DARPA and later developed gradually into this mess we are now ALL in.
the internet is not the problem. quite the oposite i think it is the best self-discovery tool man has ever achieved besides fasting and meditation.
the problem is that we let the bullies win simply because we play the game with “their” rules. now a game played like that can only end one way. to win you have to build your own rules on top of theirs (something like what RMS started with his GNU project and the FSF movement)
the problem is legislation and the way people can hold those in power accountable for what they do (what is the point of having laws if you can’t enforce them ?) - this applies to the big G as well as M and A and all the BIG TECHS out there. the problem is NOT their existance but their WAY of conducting business.
if you are fed soda from a young age when you grow up you spit mountain water for not tasting the way you are used to. same in our case.
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His sarcastic critique is correct, unfortunately with things like Gnome the problem is funding. How many of us actually fund the projects we use? And if we do donate, those few dollars don’t go very far. Hopefully they are temporary deals with the devil until a better solution can arise. Windows for example costs between $200-$300 dollars plus the cost of any software to make it usable. Can we as FOSS users pledge to add up the cost of all our software as if it was closed source and promise to donate that much each year to FOSS projects? It sounds nice, but I doubt many would take that pledge.
I do. Can’t speak for others.
On the contrary, they go a long way. Don’t look what others do. I you feel a donation is in order - do donate whatever you can spare.
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I try to do my best, but with so many projects I wonder how far those donations go. If the blogger is correct about the billions google may spend to get their hooks into software, I just can’t picture we as a community could ever match that investment. So I think it’s an unfortunate reality that those hooks will, for the forseeable future, always be there. I think the only way to fight back is to help educate users outside our communities and provide technical assistance, because I found informing people just isn’t enough when they feel it’s too complicated to switch.
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THIS
Do not understate your contribution, no matter how small you feel it is; it matters to those that are working on that project.
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The big problems I see are:
The us vs them mentality (this does more harm than good every time it comes up)
Thinking that my lone actions don’t matter because more people are already acting another way (your actions affect more than just you and change can only happen if someone actually does something even if it’s a small slow start)
Being in the minority is not a bad thing (sometimes your opinion won’t align with the majority and that’s ok. If new, to a person/people, information causes that person/people to change their opinion and you become a part of the new majority, great; if new, to you, information causes you to change your opinion, that’s fine too) opinions changing with new information is not a bad thing.
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I somehow hope the PureOS Store will at some point have, in addition to a pay-what-you-want model like elementary, a way to easily donate to certain projects especially those that are not necessariliy in the spotlight, but very important (like the Software Freedom Conservancy).
Maybe it can somehow indicate how much funding each might need.
And, more importantly, how much the whole PureOS community has given.
This has several effects.
- it gives visibility to the projects
- makes donation easy and without the need to care for 20 different payment systems
- removes the “but I’m just one, I can’t do anything really” problem
- gives a sense of “we did this together”
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it’s not a question of money alone that i feel is the MOST important aspect but HOW they are used - and here also lies the trap of bureaucracy.
for instance software development happens on hardware. do we want hardware to be free as much as software or do we hit the same PATENT road-block as most of the industry ? or maybe it’s not a road-block but more of a REFORM needed … (shorter government protection, etc)
the biggest issue is not contribution imo but indecision followed by poverty (mostly spiritual followed by material).
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I think the article misses the bigger picture (not that I’m an expert in the subject).
While I do believe there are good people with good intentions running the big companies (MS, Google, Apple, etc), it is also in their best interest to come across as privacy-friendly, especially in light of the privacy atrocities revealed over the past few years.
There’s a reason Google and Facebook have been hit with billion-dollar fines.
How come the NSA had total access to plain-text emails to people’s gmail accounts many, many years ago?
How come Facebook’s privacy violations keep coming out, and they never address the problem directly?
Consider for example the picture in the article about an ad from Apple: “What happens in your iPhone stays in your iPhone.” Sure, iOS and Android are secure probably don’t have any backdoors, but they control the app marketplace. They claim to scan every smartphone app to make sure its safe, yet they are full of privacy-violating trackers.
Don’t think apps violently violate privacy? Download one of the top, free, popular games on Android and scan it with an app like “Lumen”. Actually, let me do that for you now and post a picture in the next post.
Google and Apple are claiming responsibility for apps in those marketplaces to conform to their rules, and their rules allow for these blatant privacy violations. That’s why I now try to solely use open-source apps, and what I get from the regular marketplace I scan for trackers and block them.
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I agree, their existence is not inherently an issue, but as the old saying goes… absolute power corrupts absolutely. When knowledge is power, and such organizations have access to almost all of the personal information there is to be had, they will always turn rotten given time.
This is why my solution is to simply not feed them, including not participating in any social media. Even a “good” social media platform that respects you, doesn’t censor, etc. can be used against you, as posts are public. A data hoover can still crawl the network, suck up data on you, and use it against you in other ways.
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Ex FOSDEM co-organiser here. I noticed they got mentioned as well for allowing companies such as Google etc. to sponsor them.
Can’t speak about the rest of the projects mentioned in that post, but I very much expect their situation to be similar to that of FOSDEM: organising such events, or writing all that software, costs money. Especially if you’re giving it away for free. That money has to come from somewhere. And as long as the organisation doing the donation does stuff related to your field (and all those organisations contribute to the FOSS community, with code), and as long as they don’t interfere with whatever internal processes the receiving organisation has in place, their money is just as good and just as welcome. In fact, you should rejoice! We’re taking the enemy’s money and using it for our own purposes, while giving very little in return!
For example: you know what sponsorship at FOSDEM gets you? Your logo on the booklet, projected on the screen during the opening and closing talks, and I think that’s about it. Stands are negotiated separately from sponsorship; sponsors don’t enjoy preferential treatment (different team handles that). There’s also a job corner that’s open to anyone. So they’re free to use that, but so is everyone else. As a matter of fact, I was always surprised that those companies kept forking over money, given what little they got in return.
It’s easy to be all zealous about FOSS and take moral stands such as “we should not accept money from evil organisations, regardless of the circumstances” when you’re a student and mommy and daddy are paying your bills, or when your job title is “Welfare Recipient”. It’s a lot harder to justify this attitude when you got a mortgage, bills to pay, and are unsure about your prospects as a breatharian.
So yeah, is it ideal? Of course not. But let’s be realistic for a second: all that free stuff you enjoy today would not be possible without for-profit organisations injecting some of their surplus cash into the FOSS ecosystem. There simply aren’t enough decent unemployed software developers with too much time on their hands ready and willing to donate all their free time to the FOSS community.
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That’s a great comment. 
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is this supposed to be the excuse for imoral behavior ? what does this have to do with freedom ? free-software is not about free-beer.
let’s look at Purism - should we judge them based on the fact that they are using GNU/Linux/Debian as a starting point for their business. they didn’t create it all from scratch so why should they get to be overpriced ?
they get to be overpriced BECAUSE they respect users freedom and they ARE forgiven for NOT having done it all from scratch like many proprietary software have in the past. does that mean they haven’t contributed at all ? no quite the opposite. it’s just that the majority of the tools they use in order to create and improve this free-ecosystem have already been created/tested.
Nice try, but we both know that’s not what I was talking about at all, and you’re pulling choice quotes out of context. So no, I’m not going to engage.
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