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Sovereign Tech Agency invests €500k in Flatpak

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Re: Sovereign Tech Agency invests €500k in Flatpak

#121

Post by riedel »

hvb2 wrote: post #50
jimbob45 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do all this self-congratulation around funding OSS companies and then end up with OSS companies that exist only thanks to government subsidization. Why? Isn’t governmental control over funding what we hate about Microsoft? What is so bad about letting real customers decide which companies need funding?

> What is so bad about letting real customers decide which companies need funding? Because human nature means you won't get paid when something is free. There's donate options but those are not a reliable source of money. Unless your software is big enough that you can make money through support contracts, I don't see how you can keep the lights on while being paid

Governments are real customers. The German government, I guess, pays about 30 times more annually to Microsoft than the budget of the STF. The other component of sovereign tech is that governments are actually using FOSS. There is some room there for improvement.

Re: Sovereign Tech Agency invests €500k in Flatpak

#122

Post by ndiddy »

It's great that there's more investment being put into Flatpak development. The page mentions adding more granular permissions, which is nice to see. However, another necessary improvement is actually making it possible for software to incorporate these new granular permissions in a backwards compatible manner.

As one example, I maintain a game on Flathub that supports game controllers as an input device. By default, access to game controllers are blocked in the sandbox just like access to any other piece of hardware. The only way to use game controllers is to mark your software as requiring a blanket permission that grants access to all devices connected to the user's system. The Flatpak maintainers realized this is problematic, so a few years ago they added a permission to specifically request access to input devices (https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/pull/5481). However, because the permissions aren't backwards compatible, and because there's LTS distros under active support with old Flatpak versions released before the permission was added, you aren't allowed to use this permission on Flathub, only the blanket "all devices" permission. As a result, Flathub lists my game as "potentially unsafe" because it "can access hardware devices such as webcams and game controllers" since the only other option was disabling controller support on the Flatpak version of the game.

If they figure out a way to implement the new permissions so they can fall back to the broader kind on old Flatpak versions, this would be a massive improvement over the current situation. Otherwise you'll have to wait 10+ years before you can use newly added permissions because the only other option is breaking Flatpak on whatever ancient Ubuntu or RHEL version is still under support.

Re: Sovereign Tech Agency invests €500k in Flatpak

#124

Post by Vinnl »

xyzelement wrote: post #101
robin_reala wrote: post #66

The Soverign Tech Agency are currently hiring for a Director of Technology. Definitely a dream job for someone. https://www.sovereign.tech/jobs/director-of-technology

"Director of Technology (all genders)" I guess I hadn't looked at German want ads ever. Is mentioning the gender as the most important qualification - literally in the headline - standard practice? Also I guess Berlin is cheaper but seeing 99.5k EUR as the upper bound salary for a director role is a bit jarring. I guess it's just the "otherness" of it but the DEI statement is shaped oddly to an American eye too. Plea…

Huh funny, now that you mention it: at least in the Netherlands, job listings have had "(m/v)" (male/female) in the title since forever, i.e. way before woke was a thing, but that indeed is kinda weird. "All genders" is probably just a modern ("woke") version of that same old practice.

Re: Sovereign Tech Agency invests €500k in Flatpak

#125

Post by iamnothere »

koe123 wrote: post #26
tancop wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nix is always doing its own thing. The community is fragmented and there are no enforced packaging conventions. They have a "best practices" page that lists language features you're not supposed to use because they break reproducible builds, aka the whole point of Nix. And they don't even restrict network access by default. It's also not doing runtime sandboxing at all. Isolated builds protect you from supply chain a…

Maybe I am vastly underestimating it, but I could imagine this being buildable atop of nix quite straightforward?

It already exists and is called nixpak

Re: Sovereign Tech Agency invests €500k in Flatpak

#126

Post by 654wak654 »

TekMol wrote: post #2

I never understood why a program installed in Flatpak is not just a directory on disk. When you install something via Flatpak, it still changes data in god-knows-what places on my disk. And the software itself has read/write access to god-knows-where on my disk. The answer is probably "convenience and efficiency". But I would much prefer a "An application is a directory and by default cannot access anything outside o…

I think most people making a good ol' desktop program these days do it because they need very liberal access to the filesystem, or access to weird hardware peripherals. If they don't need either they could just put their app on the web!

Looking at the top apps on Mint's "app store" shows this trend too, everything is an editor of sorts (code editors, photo editors, video editors, audio editors, painting, modelling etc.)

Re: Sovereign Tech Agency invests €500k in Flatpak

#128

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #32

A lot of Flatpak's design is a great prototype, but it's somewhat worrying (for the ecosystem in general) that this was taken as a final design and being pushed out in all directions. Portals are just a terrible design for a security boundary: all interfaces clobbered up into one huge daemon, which also deals with a lot of the internals of Flatpak/Snap. If you want your sandbox to use portals, you can't, because it r…

> The whole system also deeply intermixes the package manager and sandboxing engine — to the point where you can't use the sandboxing engine with your favourite package manager, and you can't use the package manager without the sandboxing engine.

You can use a pretty big portion of the sandbox separately, because it's just bubblewrap.

Re: Sovereign Tech Agency invests €500k in Flatpak

#129

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

JanisErdmanis wrote: post #23

I like the idea behind Flatpak and the ability to sandbox applications. What I don't understand is why they chose to lock the build process so tightly to Linux. I'm currently on macOS, and while I can cross-compile applications, I can't actually bundle them as Flatpaks. For that, I need `flatpak-builder`, which is so deeply coupled to Linux itself that I don't think it can realistically run on other platforms. Snaps…

I do tend to agree that in an deal world it should be possible to cross-build flatpaks, but:

1. You can't then test the output to make sure it even works.

2. As a practical point, you could just do it in a VM

Re: Sovereign Tech Agency invests €500k in Flatpak

#130

Post by 38848484 »

nwellnhof wrote: post #95
nkmnz wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Compensation is based on the collective agreement for the public sector in Germany (TVöD-Bund) and will range from €64,000 to €82,000 per year for a full-time position, including 30 days of vacation, depending on qualifications and experience. LOL. That's €32,122 net for a full time position. And you're not even allowed to work from a place in southern Europe where you can actually live from that amount of money.

It's more like €40,000-50,000 after taxes and contributions to health care, social security and the German pension fund. Enough for a modest lifestyle in Germany. Many OSS contributors aren't motivated by money after all.

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