I really wish more people in the forum (and in the community at large) understood that distinction. The FOSS community has been hurt and exploited so many times in the past by other companies that use the community essentially to get free software development, without contributing back, that I think too many people’s default response is to assume malice and exploitation as the explanation behind any action (or inaction).
Everyone at Purism truly believes in and practices those ethics that are in our SPC. It would be difficult to work here and not share those values because essentially everything we do here is made more complicated and difficult due to sticking to them. I never had as many discussions about ethics, free software, and what’s best for the community and end-users as I have working at Purism.
Until someone can convince the holders of 2/3rds of the shares to change or abolish the SPC charter, any single shareholder can sue the company if it violates its SPC charter. This effectively stops the management of Purism from ever violating its SPC charter, because you would have to buy up 2/3rds of the shares to change the company. Any company or investor buying Purism would have to make sure that it controls 2/3rds of the shares, or it will be forced to abide by the SPC charter. Otherwise, all it takes is one idealistic shareholder to stop Purism from ever turning into a company like Google.
The second check on the company is the fact that it has attracted a loyal base of customers who would instantly denounce the company and criticize it in very harsh terms if it violates its SPC charter. Also many of the employees would quit the company, because it has attracted employees who care about free software and privacy. At this point, it would probably mean economic suicide for Purism as a company to start violating its SPC charter in a major way, because it would lose a large portion of its customers and its employees.
I’m pretty sure that many of the people who work at Purism could get paid more working with other companies, but they choose to work at Purism at a lower salary because they agree with the SPC charter. Those types of employees won’t stay if Purism starts behaving like a typical tech company.
Either that or move to “round table”, but forking topics really should fork threads too - even there.
To be a bit cheeky, I think the original poster of the first message mis-categorized this, as this wasn’t about HW [see label mouse-over]
good grief…
I think I like the second best as it literally stops short of saying “won’t somebody think of the children!”
The third one, notice the revision “may need to work with service providers” is crossed out. - the original draft then seems to suggest that they’d planned to work in secret.
hopefully this brings into sharper focus what I’d said about about governments making applications illegal and stopping me from being able to decide what to install on my devices.
(remember when software that could support encryption had export restrictions?!)
It’s only through my freedom to decide what I put on my phone, (and the ability to trust a not-big tech vested eco system) that can provide the confidence that your software / device stack is good.
(e.g. you can’t have privacy or security without freedom.)
(though there is a clear balance to any of these fundamental principals.)
Technologic dominance tends to create oligopolies. We saw this play out with Twitter at the beginning of the month and then parler and now Gamestop and other stocks. This is certainly cleaner issue to litigate in the courts because the damage is quantifiable. It should be interesting to watch…
It’d be nice to have a separate system for phones from Apple and Google with all of the apps available from their stores.
I didn’t see any mention of GrapheneOS here, which is based off of AOSP and is security and privacy enhanced, but does not support Google Play services with the bootloader locked.
I’m sure if left unlocked might be able to get it running or use MicroG or something else similar to get more functionality out of apps that require play services if needed while reducing the security.
Would be nice to have an alternative with as many options and the quality offered by Google and Apple. Without a store-like environment in which apps can be monetized I think that is hard to expect or realize unless something is used like anbox to run apps that are present on one of their stores.
Developers need to get paid, obviously, and any viable alternative to Google and Apple’s app store for phones will need to be similarly lucrative for people to monetize their apps. I think an unfortunate consequence of their need to monetize results in using user’s data to create additional revenue streams by analyzing usage data.
Regardless, I think any viable third option to enter this market will have to have a large user base and a system that allows developers to make money from their applications within the store to attract companies and developers.
You may be able to delay it at least.
Not that that stops Apple from changing the OS so that’s not possible, and not that I know that they haven’t already done so.
As of 11:44 UTC we’ve submitted a detailed appeal to reiterate that Element is a generic chat app for connecting to the global Matrix communication network, just as Chrome is a generic web browser for connecting to the Web - and just as Google does not control the content on the Web, Element does not control the content on Matrix.
[Emphasis mine]
Ooops, maybe telling Google that “we control the Matrix network just as much as you control the Web” is not the best strategy . Google search/Analytics/tagmanager/safe browsing or AMP, anyone?
