Please add an antifeatures to the RocketChat app. Yunohost has this, and in December RocketChat made big changes in their plans. Every person self-hosting a fresh RocketChat server installation will be forced to register, share their admin email address, and put into a pro trial plan, which allows sales persons from RocketChat to contact you. You can go into the admin settings and unsubscribe from this plan and continue with the Community version, but this is not in the spirit of free and open source software. Adding the using non-free parts or something like that seems appropriate.
which antifeature exactly? 
1 Like
When will everyone learn that if it’s not an open extensible federated protocol with multiple independent implementations then it’s trash?
1 Like
F-Droid can look at the disclaimer that Yunohost put on it, and decide whether Yunohost people have “to learn something” :
And I would appreciate a non-free networks disclaimer as well for RocketChat in F-Droid. Forcing RocketChat self-hosting admin users into a pro trial without being transparent about, and having RocketChat sales people repeatedly email you, is not about freedom and privacy.
The “freedom” that F-Droid flags is related to the app, eg. user can choose a server
Regarding that server, by reading Suprising user limit in 6.5.0 · Issue #31149 · RocketChat/Rocket.Chat · GitHub and Rocket.Chat/LICENSE at develop · RocketChat/Rocket.Chat · GitHub the community edition is still free, yes?
1 Like
I would not consider the Community version free as in freedom anymore, as after a self-host installation the admin is forced to register with RocketChat and give their email address to Rocketchat (Before that one could opt out of registering and no email address was forcefully shared). Then RocketChat forcefully puts the self-hosted installation in pro trial mode (with a countdown of days) without informing the admin user properly. It is possible to go into the admin settings and opt out by finding the subscribe button to return to the Community edition. Even a freemium style Mattermost self-hosted installation does better than that with no nagging.
And on F-Droid both Mattermost and Zulip come with Anti-Features disclaimer (In case of Zulip this seems misguided as there is no difference between Enterprise and self hosted Zulip, it is in both cases 100 % open source with no restrictions and with no tracking (unlike with RocketChat) in notifications emails). Why no disclaimer for RocketChat ? I hope F-Droid people are not affiliated with RocketChat corporation ? 
Or what is the reason to defend RocketChat so fiercely ?
You do know F-Droid does not distribute the server, yes?
You do know the app does not create servers. yes?
Hence, as the app does not exist in a void, you don’t just happen to join random servers, you join a server knowing about it, so you can inform yourself on the openness of that server, BEFORE interacting with any app, yes?
Great accusations need great proof. The app (the thing that F-Droid hosts) is innocent until proven guiilty.
Why no disclaimer for RocketChat ? I hope F-Droid people are not affiliated with RocketChat corporation ?
yes yes, also F-Droid sells the apps, SPECIAL SALE JUST THIS WEEK ALL APPS FOR $0!!!1111
/PS: I hope you don’t end up in the other end where you feel that F-Droid has not defended an app enough 
1 Like
I also all of them should be tagged as UpstreamNonFree. 
I don’t know why zulip is tagged as NonFreeNet though.
1 Like
hmm, latest version does not seem to connect anywhere other than the server you give it
reading zulip: 27.189 (!11516) · Merge requests · F-Droid / Data · GitLab maybe it was an oversight, you seem to have fixed it
hehe, thanks for the hint
Okay, I would love to hear why Zulip has a disclaimer on F-Droid.
I love it that F-Droid makes it possible for end users to be privacy aware about applications, and that binary blobs are removed and Anti feature warnings are added. For example all the apps that use YouTube, I like it to be reminded about that.
In case of RocketChat, I would add :
- Upstream code is not completely free (Source : Yunohost)
- Promotes non-free networks (Even though the community server for RocketChat can be installed, one is forced to register and share an email address with RocketChat with no opt out. After that one must know to search in the settings to unsubscribe from the pro trial. That is a violation of privacy and freedom)
- Tracks user activity (Install a RocketChat server, start a direct message to one of your users, check the email notification about it, and see a web link which looks like tracking web link pointing to go.rocket.chat ; In the admin settings, if you search, this go web link can be changed it looks like).
Some web links
After registering the server last year (to regain mobile notifications), the sales team sent 10(!) emails (in a weekly manner) to get us to sign up for the paid version.
- No consent was given for the trial.
- No consent was given for the starter plan.
- No information was given that upgrading to 6.5.0 would prompt everyboy to give an administrative email address to register a workspace.
- No information was given in any of the linked pages that the community version still exists.
you mean the server? F-Droid does not host the server software but…
NonFreeNet might apply to the app, but since there is an option of purely FOSS server there’s no need
As above, and honestly I don’t care about the admins pain, ok if RC suxx then don’t use it, switch to XMPP or Matrix
nasty
This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.