Comment by dannyw 10 days ago
I agree it’s a bit concerning but please keep in mind F-Droid is a volunteer-run community project. Especially with some EU countries moving to open source software, it would be nice to see some public funding for projects like F-Droid.
The EU governments should gradually start switching to open source solutions. New software projects should be open source by default and only closed if there is a real reason for it.
The EU is already home to many OS contributors and companies. I like the Red Hat approach where you are profitable, but with open source solutions. It's great for governments because you get support, but it's much easier to compete, which reduces prices.
Smaller companies also give more of their money to open source. Bigger companies can always fork it and develop it internally and can therefore pressure devs to do work for less. Smaller companies have to rely on the projects to keep going and doing it all in house would be way too expensive for most.
> I like the Red Hat approach where you are profitable, but with open source solutions.
The Red Hat that was bought by IBM?
I agree with your goals, but the devil is in the methods. If we want governments to support open source, the appropriate method is probably a legislative requirement for an open source license + a requirement to fund the developer.
Apple has an iPhone app store monopoly, but Google is the bad guy here?
hogwash
It's interesting to me how people panicked about the idea that 23AndMe's bankruptcy implies that some unknown, untrusted third-party will have their genetic information, but people are also crowing at the idea that a company that has purchase history on all your smartphone apps (and their permissions, and app data backup) could be compelled by the government to divest that function to some unknown, untrusted third-party.
> Nice to see some public funding for projects like F-Droid
Definitely, SSE4.1 instruction set based CPU, for building apps in 2025, No way!!
> please keep in mind F-Droid is a volunteer-run community project.
To, me, that's the worrying part.
Not that it's ran by volunteers. But that all there's left between a full-on "tech monopoly" or hegemony, and a free internet, is small bands of underfunded volunteers.
Opposition to market dominance and monopolies by multibillion multinationals shouldn't just come from a few volunteers. If that's the case, just roll over and give up; the cause is lost. (As I've done, hence my defaitism)
Aside from that: it being "a volunteer ran community" shouldn't be put as an excuse for why it's in trouble/has poor UX/is hard to use/is behind/etc. It should be a killer feature. Something that makes it more resilient/better attuned/easier/earlier adopting/etc.