Note that “source available on github” doesn’t necessarily mean it’s free software. You have to look at the license to make sure.

That said I believe Stremio’s repos are licensed freely (the web app looks like it’s GPLv2), but as OP noted their application(s) are proprietary.

This

I’ve been very outspoken about my non-belief in intellectual property; I don’t think reading information or making a copy of it is stealing it. On the flipside, these bots are effectively performing a denial-of-service attack on public infrastructure, wasting computing resources, bandwidth, and time that is finite. The internet is for humans first and bots second; I don’t care about bots so much as long as they are well-behaved, which these are not.

My own instance went under several weeks back, then I installed Anubis and suddenly it’s usable again.

Like any company offering “exclusive deals only in the app” the catch is you have to sign up for an account and install an app. That’s one more account and one more app that you would have not normally installed but for the “deal.”

Intellectual property is imaginary and making a copy of something isn’t stealing it. In contrast, Disney actually has contributed to something which could more easily be likened to theft - namely, strangling of the public domain (after helping itself generously to public domain stories and characters).

I don’t like Midjourney as it’s a proprietary service-as-a-software-substitute, but Disney actually is the greater evil here. It’s probably worth noting that Disney didn’t actually create the vast majority of characters at issue here.

This might be a hot take but the best way to avoid or “bypass” onerous things like the “integrity API” is to opt out of the proprietary world as much as possible. Use exclusively free (Libre) software and technology where you can.

We should not be thinking in terms of how do we get proprietary crapware onto our free systems, because that defeats the purpose of a free system. The idea is to build an alternative to the proprietary world.

Pidgin is still around, and you can even use discord with it (no voice, mind you).

I would like to bring the multi-platform client back.

This doesn’t even make sense. If the spell falls apart without Kier’s symbol, then Kier’s symbol absolutely is “actually necessary.”

You can see what Fennec removes or patches out compared to upstream Firefox:

https://gitlab.com/relan/fennecbuild/-/blob/master/fenix-liberate.patch

https://gitlab.com/relan/fennecbuild/-/blob/master/gecko-liberate.patch

https://gitlab.com/relan/fennecbuild/-/blob/master/prebuild.sh?ref_type=heads

It should be noted, some so-called tracker detectors will find false positives for various proprietary libraries that are “stubbed out” - that is, the interfaces are still there but they have been replaced with empty functions that do nothing.

According to the tracking antifeature on Fennec, it “Connects to various Mozilla services that can track users.” SkewedZeppelin (former Mull maintainer) lists some of these in this post. I should be clear that none of these are “trackers” but they are unsolicited connections to Mozilla services that could be used to track users.

I don’t know about Ironfox, as far as I know Mull was based on Fennec F-Droid and Ironfox claims to be a continuation of that project, but I can’t tell how close Ironfox is to Fennec nowadays.

It absolutely is. WSL literally runs Linux in a virtual machine.

I don’t use brew but I do use Guix on top of PopOS, for most of the same reasons I use Guix System as a daily driver distro on my other machines. The PopOS install is meant to act as a “Windows replacement” so it has proprietary drivers, Steam, etc. For anything that’s not a system package I get it from Guix if possible, because I prefer Guix’s package management and its commitment to software freedom.

On Windows I use Scoop which has a handful of similarities in terms of user package management.

From a technical or legal perspective, copyright infringement is not theft. The relationship a copyright holder has with a work is of a completely different character than actual ownership. See Dowling v. United States (1985).

Whether or not “AI” training constitutes copyright infringement is, as far as I know, still up in the air. And, while I believe most of us can agree that actual theft is unethical, the ethics of copyright infringement are as far as I know also very debatable.

Disclaimer - not an uncritical supporter of “AI.”

I think F-droid is woefully misunderstood especially in privacy circles.

The main benefit of F-Droid is that it works (as best it can) to guarantee software freedom. This means, for each app, you can be assured it is under a free software license, built from corresponding source code, and contains no proprietary components. F-droid has an inclusion policy that forbids proprietary blobs and they have to build everything from source in order to ensure that - however, if the app is reproducible, F-droid can actually verify that the already built app from the developer satisfies the inclusion policy without needing to sign its own builds, which is ideal. It’s important to note that without building from source, there is no way to guarantee that the source corresponds to the binary, which is important for exercising the four freedoms.

I don’t agree with everything F-droid does and I don’t think F-droid is perfect. The security folks have a few valid points, I think, but they fail to offer a solution that solves the same problem that F-droid does, either because they misunderstand what problem that is, or simply do not care about it. F-droid is not an app store, it’s a community-maintained distribution like a GNU/Linux distribution. App stores are not alternatives to F-droid and serve different problems. There is, as far as I know, no other project that attempts to serve the same purpose as F-droid.

No. This isn’t a thing. Don’t try to make it a thing.

Once something leaves your computer you lose control of it. The recipient can do whatever they want with the message. If you don’t trust the recipient not to be malicious then don’t send them anything sensitive. You can’t untell a secret.

Proprietary software in general, Discord and Twitter in specific

Guix is currently hosted on FSF infrastructure and, as another commenter pointed out, is in the process of migrating to Codeberg. It has never been on Github.

microG replaces the Play services application on your device, but it’s still going to be dependent on Google servers if you are using push notifications. There’s no way around that unless the app supports a non-Google alternative such as UnifiedPush or even just a web socket.

smart tab groups, a new AI-powered feature that suggests names and groups based on the tabs you have open.

Yeah sure ok. Did the community ask for this too?

open source, but not free

Free here means free-as-in-freedom. The free software definition and open source definition are almost identical, there are very few apps that are only one or the other.

It’s the free software movement, though - the four freedoms are literally the cornerstone of the movement. They’re not simply a “nice to have” they’re the bare minimum of what we should ask for. If we promote non-free “alternatives” we are saying that these basic freedoms are not an expectation, but are optional and negotiable - we are moving the message away from the four freedoms and towards “evil” proprietary applications, while making exceptions for the “lesser evil” ones.

When I say Obsidian is non-free I am not saying Obsidian is evil or you are not allowed to use it. As non-free apps go Obsidian is probably one of the least-worst, as you and many others point out it is just a markdown editor so there is no vendor lock in or weird proprietary format. I am simply saying, this is a movement focused on “the four freedoms” and Obsidian does not meet those four very basic criteria.