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I've tried to extol the virtues of FOSS for a long time. Not many people even care about it or their privacy, always parroting the adage "If i do nothing wrong what do I need to worry about" without a further thought.
FOSS is not American. Foss belongs to literally everyone.
I kept saying it all over the place regarding the fascistic rejection of Russian (as in race) code and got flamed as result. These people use FOSS, especially GNU/GPL software and yet they have no clue about the license themselves.
Free software is the antithesis of capitalism. It doesn't make sense to boycott them.
I always like to say the fruits of FOSS labour are the common heritage of mankind. It belongs to all of us as a public good, created and maintained by selfless workers. (Nevermind the fact that most FOSS projects are based out of Europe anyways).
Lol, first time I hear that, as European😆 what a stupid movement..
I'm the most anti-American user on here and I agree.
I'd rather use USA-linked free software than Spotify.
Is someone doing that? If it's FOSS it's from the internet.
Seeing people look for corporate social media alternatives is painful.
> "Hey guys, I want to leave X, should I go to Bluesky or Threads? What? Mastodon? Never heard of that. Looks very complicated, I'll pass"
> -- CEO, founder, IT wizz on LinkedIn
Every time!
Or the classic "guys I am leaving WhatsApp, moved my whole family to Signal, another centralized US-based silo that requires phone numbers and runs on AWS, CloudFlare, etc."
Signal: over a decade of leaking nothing and providing a great service for free, with some weird hiccups along the way like cryptocurrency.
Privacy "advocates": fuck signal
Thanks for sticking it to the Signal shills, I use Telegram and I understand how bad it is but I'd never use signal in a million years
“Hey guys, I want to leave WhatsApp, should I go to Telegram or Signal?"
-- you guys are NOT helping, that's still exactly the same problem. Just stay away from anything that isn't open source, decentralized, self-hostable, e2e encrypted (without rolling their own crypto). That basically leaves only Matrix or XMPP.
and the thing is: Telegram having a proprietary server feels more opensource and open to 3rd party clients and developers (ex. bots, mini-apps etc) than Signal, Signal's issue tracker has a bot auto-closing stale issues and several people are completely ignored, never receive a reply
I highly recommend you to give a try to https://arcanechat.me/ (I am the developer) it is heavily inspired by Telegram, if you want to test it you can join this community group: https://i.delta.chat/#6CBFF8FFD505C0FDEA20A66674F2916EA8FBEE99=&a=invitebot%40nine.testrun.org&g=ArcaneChat+Community&x=3KvvQZfzU4t-9u5s0PF3USGp&i=AQKH9_8x0R0&s=dbGW9xOhRQX
we're not classic, we're advanced nerds engineers : signal is one church without any interoperability, so we've moved to both SIP and XMPP variants using differents provider in the family : everything is decentralized, exactly like email (we dont use gafam ones). It's not that hard to enjoy xmpp, and really decentralized tools, a bit like for SIP (we have several Voip providers here).
I like SIP and XMPP, but in practice I don't have any contacts to use it and the apps are lacking a bit compared to ArcaneChat/DeltaChat, besides the problem of losing groups because the XMPP server went down etc. there are some downsides but yes, if I was not satisfied with ArcaneChat I would use XMPP and SIP, or anything that is open source, decentralized and doesn't require a phone number
lol who is suggesting boycotting foss projects?
I think OP means that one shouldn't boycott FOSS projects just because they are from USA. That said, I don't like to be told what I have to do and don't agree to "FOSS projects, which should always be preferred to corporate software". My pc, my LAN, my rules.
you seem to hold your individual freedoms high, there is a kind of software i think you'll really like
You seem to wanting to school me about what my preference should be. I'll happily block you. Bye.
Counterpoint: Fedora is a testing bed for Red Hat. One of Red Hat's notable customers is the US military. I'd prefer to stay off that path if I can help it. It's a matter of trust, and it's a matter of indirectly contributing. I've seen people say the same things about Deepin and everyone nods in agreement, but why the hell should I trust a US project, for the same reasons?
Same with NixOS treating with Anduril, I jump to Guix-SD and never looked back
why the hell should I trust a US project
Bekuz Amerika fridom wurld polis, best kontri in da world!
But on a more serious note, did you know Linus banned those Russian contributors like a month after redhat and DoD signed a new deal. Can you guess who owns RH stocks?
Agree with the main point, though disagree that FOSS is "boycotting capitalism", many for-profit companies contribute to FOSS and FOSS can be used by for-profit companies too, much of today's capitalism runs on FOSS.
The point of free software is that it does not have owners, so what exactly are you "boycotting"?
Tell it to the Russian Linux devs that foss has no owners :-) Theory and practice are 2 different things
FOSS doesn't mean that you are entitled to a place at the table or that your contributions have to be accepted. Nothing prevents these Russian devs from continuing to to work on the kernel.
Pretty sure American laws explicitly prevent them from working on the Kernel. It's stupid but that's what happened iirc
They can fork it, if nobody wants to work with them anymore that's their problem
I get it as an European that it means more to me to consume "locally" and to prioritize services that are European-based. But due to the nature of computers and FOSS, borders are redefined and it is more about ideas and politics rather than physical location. However, computers and servers are also physical and submitted to legislations of countries, we cannot ignore laws such as the Patriot act and the power that the American state can have even on FOSS projects.
For me the priority is to use software that match my needs; if I have the choice between an American and an European solution, I'll tend to choose the latter one.
Totally agree. The majority of Americans are great people. Not everyone is MAGA. We need to support the good ones. Sanctions and boycotts tend to unite.
One exception would be if the project imposse a security risk because key people and servers, within the US, may be blackmailed or pushed by the new administration. We're not there yet though. And I hope these projects and people migrate if this becomes the case.
Also, FOSS projects run by big tech are probably also wise to avoid for strategic reasons.
The majority of Americans are great people
They're not the majority if they can't win an election — just sayin'.
77mio out of 340mio voted for trump which is roughly 22.6%
a minority of the population voted for trump though, it's not like 50+% of the total population voted for him, it's 50+% of the voters, a lot of people just didn't vote.
a lot of people just didn't vote.
So they decided that it was just fine if he won and saw no reason to oppose what he stands for...
Yeah, that's some good people right there I can see that /s
Totally agree. The majority of Americans are great people.
Not choosing to vote or speak is endorsing the establishment. We are not great people. We are dumbfucks.