That is true and the reason for that is not capitalism, of course. Most projects don’t have UI experts and when someone wants to help, devs usually don’t listen. Sometimes there are technical obstacles too (old framework, hardcoded UI), but probably not in web or Electron apps.
compared to their paid alternative
Keep in mind that Libre Software can be commercial too, so you really mean proprietary alternatives.
As a UI developer I consider GNOME 4 to be one of the best desktop UIs. But some people prefer to live in the past and use 30 years old designs than try anything new, even if it might be better for them long term.
Nothing prevents Libre Software developers from making commercial products. They can sell their software just like everyone else.
Even The Linux Foundation has a twitter
Because Linus Torvalds doesn’t care about the Free Software movement and user freedom. It’s why his kernel is still on GPL2.
Perhaps you are right, but it’s way more difficult, takes a lot of time and requires a different set of skills. If there is spyware in it, it would be illegal to remove it and distribute a patch for other users. So even if you find something, there is not much you can do about it.
It’s not very practical to add spyware into Libre Software though, because it wouldn’t be hard to find and it would be very easy for users to remove it.
This is not about price. Nobody is saying that authors can’t charge for their software. It’s about freedom.
Your computer/smartphone is controlled by the software that runs on it. Libre Software like Jerboa gives you the source code and the right to study it, modify it and distribute it. This means that anyone can verify what the program does and change it if needed. It means that users actually control the program. If the authors added malicious functionality, it would be easy to remove it.
Proprietary software doesn’t give you those freedoms. It’s very difficult to verify what such program does or change it. You can’t really control it, but it controls your device. If it contains malicious functionality, usually you can’t do anything about it. That’s why proprietary software is unethical. It gives developers power over their users and they often abuse that power.
I’m not touching it with a long stick until someone does some proper security analysis on it
How would that happen? It’s proprietary software, we don’t have access to the source code. And that’s the whole point. We can’t verify what it does and we can’t modify it.
The alternative is Free/Libre Software. That’s what Lemmy is, Jerboa and many others. Their authors publish the source code and let their users study it, modify it and distribute it. Because they are not trying to hide anything from us. That’s the ethical way to make software.
It’s about having the freedom to control your own devices. Proprietary software like Sync takes away that freedom, so it’s unethical. We should be complaining about it.
I don’t understand why this gets so much talk
Because proprietary software is unethical.
You are right, but I see no reason why you couldn’t sell Libre software. People never have to pay for software, they choose to do it. It doesn’t matter if the app is proprietary or not.
The Free Software movement has nothing to do with price. It’s about freedom. We deserve to have the freedom to control our own devices. Proprietary software takes that away, so it’s unethical.
It’s a discussion about ethics. Proprietary software is unethical.
Ah, I see. So you are an expert in psychology, marketing and statistics. That is truly amazing. It’s completely irrelevant to the topic of our discussion (which is about privacy and software), but very cool.
Fun fact: both facebook.com and twitter.com have a Tor site to make it harder to censor them.
Every day of people still using Reddit is a day when a portion of humanity’s ability to communicate is controlled by one psychopath.
Yes, there are many things that people should be taught at school. Technology is just one area. All of the things you said are also very important, but it doesn’t make what I said invalid.
Knowing marketing, for example, wouldn’t cause someone to be fooled to the point of saying something like this:
But they should know what cryptocurrencies and AI are, since those technologies are slowly becoming a part of our lives.
Fooled by what exactly? A distributed ledger or machine learning? I think it’s a simple fact that those technologies are becoming more popular.
You make it sound like the problem is technology.
The post is about privacy and software. It’s important for people to be educated in other areas as well, but they weren’t the topic of this discussion. So there was no point for me to mention them.
You’re focusing on a single channel of abuse.
I make software, so I talk about software. I’m not an expert in the other areas that you mentioned.
Yes and how is the developer supposed to earn their money when they can’t spy on people and insert ads?!!!!!!!1111
You think it was just a fake promise? I haven’t thought about it, but it’s certainly possible.
Only employees can have an account on those servers. Registration is not open to the public.
I know, I just wanted to explain the real reason why their UIs often suck. I agree that it has nothing to do with capitalism.
Lemmy is a perfect example of such project, btw. The devs can’t design a good UI themselves and they ignore people’s proposals, so users make their own themes and browser addons to fix it.
We can have nice software, people just need to care.