I like how you did not respond to the content my post and then left out the 3 words in that line that do NOT serve your point.
Read my postS from above again, what is my point again?
Your point is (to paraphrase Adorno) that there is no right life in the wrong one.
What was mine?
You can see my posts above that I try to explain that such an AF is unneeded and that F-Droid is not the place to annoy devs.
But I do agree that this is an unfortunate situation.
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well
I think an apology is in order.
I completely read the thread about two months ago and only re-skimmed before posting my statement. When your reply came I must have pulled the wrong summary from my mental file cabinet.
Sorry. Now it was ME who’s barking up the wrong tree.
Guess I was already in “fight mode” because to be honest I find the whole issue rather annoying:
As I tried to explain there is no harm done on the source code level.
Also there is no real hard lock-in here. Pull the repo, push it somewhere else. Or keep it local. The beauty of a distributed version control system…
In other words: I find the discussion to be rather theoretical and philosophical (<- that does NOT mean “pointless”!) and the impact of code host in software development is quite over-exaggerated here.
And then I think of the DEVs. Good ladies and gents that (often after a hard days work) sit down and code something for all of us to use for free. I feel deeply thankful (also because I myself can’t really bring myself to code ANYTHING after getting home and putting the kids to bed . . . )
Planing to tell these people that their app will be put into the same category as apps that send data home to 3rd party servers just because somebody deems their toolchain unworthy feels a bit spoiled and bratty to me.
(and that kind of feedback could be the straw that breaks one or two or 20 camels backs out there. That’s not the price I would like to pay in the name of purity)
In short:
I am being a bit emotional here. Which is not always good in a discussion.
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Does nobody care if microsoft github is profiting by creating new products like copyalot off the backs of developers who gave them their source (as well as data on interactions)?
distributed
Thanks for the info on how git works. In a perfect world, maybe FreedomBox would make it easy to self-host, and actually take advantage of distributed development instead of centralized.
app will be put into the same category as apps that send data home to 3rd party servers just because somebody deems their toolchain unworthy feels a bit spoiled and bratty to me.
“It is what it is.” There are 11 categories. Each is simply a line of words in app descriptions, not something to click to agree. OsmAnd has 4, no biggie to add one more for using proprietary microsoft github.
Wanting to use a more free toolchain seems like a desirable thing to me, and to some developers. I understand it is nearly impossible to maintain, however, because keeping up with Google’s changes may be harder than leaving proprietary github/lab.
I have some understanding of factors that push dev’s to use proprietary github/lab and others, from here and elsewhere.
informing users of actual threats and undesired behaviors in the app that they don’t have the time or knowledge to analyze themselves.
Again, a “positive” recognition, or Pro-Feature, could also be used to “reward” apps using “better” free development sites, to avoid “shaming”.
Yes, 777 apps with many anti-features: 220 with No Source Since, 25 with Non-Free Addons, 27 with Non-Free Assets, 35 with Non-Free Dependencies, and 380 with Non-Free Network Services.
IMO, the 3000+ F-Droid apps developed on Non-Free Github/lab do encourage using “Non-Free Network Services”, almost as much as the 380 that are currently tagged.
apples and oranges
I hesitate to use analogies because they often go off the rails, but lets risk it - Food labels. We could debate whether labels like “organic”, “fair trade”, “contains no high fructose corn syrup”, processed in a facility that also processes nuts, contains only free-range chicken, kosher, halal, vegetarian, vegan, … are well defined, meaningful, or just marketing BS. Regardless, many people want to know some details about the creation of the foods going into their pie holes. Similar applies to F-Droid and processing of apps to put into your android, or should.
You know what?
Technically I am one of those developers (I have some pet projects nobody needs and I fix a bug once in a while).
And I really don’t care.
And most people in the open source community that I interact with seem to be concerned more with “getting shit done” and less with “saving the world with rigorous principles”.
Looks like this is also reflected in the license statistics from 2015. Basically all projects allow commecial use. And more then half of them are released under licenses (MIT and Apache) that explicitly allow changing the code and then making it closed source…
Those developers don’t need saving, can speak for themselves and are gone from github within 30 minutes (longer if CI is involved) if the cost-benefit ratio does not work out for them anymore.
(a little anecdote around copilot: when the news broke last year I overheard two colleagues joking that if Microsoft wanted to build a tool that helps you write shitty code, they chose the right training set)
you don’t need freedombox for that. Just a linux machine and about 20 minutes.
But self-hosting comes with its own problems, issues and hassles. I am not doing it.
And while git in theory can be totally decentralized in real life projects are going to converge towards one dedicated upstream host.
“wanting” : yes
“being pushed” : not so much
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Thank you for commenting. You have helped me solidify my views of apps and F-Droid. We simply disagree on a lot, but that’s OK.
People have suggested F-Droid should have app ratings, but that is difficult to implement without tracking users, and has other problems including generally pissing off developers. OTOH, F-Droid could have their own “curated” ratings, based on F-Droid values (if they can agree on them). Anti-Features is a start, but only in a negative way.
I would like to see a “curated” F-Droid numeric rating system that includes plus points for Non-permissive licenses, using “free” development systems, and websites that don’t block Tor, regular but not too high frequency updates, …
Of course I would also like F-Droid data to be accurate and up to date, but people can only do so much…
copyalot joke
Funny, but if we don’t know how they weighted stuff when training their AI, we don’t know if the shitty code was included or not. Maybe they put more weight on higher quality “private” projects…
If you “don’t care” about copyright or licensing violation, then IDK what can be said. 
A “freenes level” is something I could get behind. To me that’s a completely different thing than an anti-feature (which to many is warning and sometimes even causes apps to be filtered for which I still don’t see a rational justification in using github).
The score would be much more in the “gamification ballpark”
That is not what I said or meant.
I do care about copyright VIOLATIONS.
But on one hand I don’t care about the copyright of my code (which is why I, like so many, chose the MIT license for my projects).
On the other hand as far as I underdtood the discurse it is very debateable whether Microsoft violated licenses (even those like the GPL) simply because using the code to teach an AI what code looks like is not formaly covered by those licenses.
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Drew devault agrees - do not use, and push back against, Microsoft github and copyalot (copilot). No surprise.
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After moving from ms proprietary github to gitlab, PostmarketOS is considering moving to Sourcehut.
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Software freedom conservancy agrees, give up github.
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Attackers agree, best to avoid proprietary microsoft windows and github.
Edit+
Could one say that if all the best known devs just quickly switched entirely to another hoster, that it could impact FOSS usage/awareness to certain users such as newer ones? Just a theory that popped in my head, stability always looks good.
I do like the how many are moving away even if slowly though. Not very worried about m$ changing code but would just rather not support a foss destructer.
It has happened before though. Sourceforge was THE place to find foss. Now it’s a cultural footnote, like Myspace.
True, forgot about that.
At github,
Malware
And lawsuits
Yeah. So? All right and propper but a bit hyper-ventilating. Don’t you think?
This dude appears to be mostly outraged by stars, feeds, “user engagement” and emojis. Mentions the AI training issue only in a passing sentence.
Better leaving while you are free to do it on your own terms…
I don’t really understand that part. It is literally two or three shell commands to configure a new remote and push the code to the new location.
That’s the issue though, as more users come for the “easy” webui.
You can’t imagine how many times we had to guide devs that wanted to add an app to do stuff without the Github webui.
Their mind is stuck in Android Studio and webui, shell commands? Ok, boomer
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