21–30 of 136 posts
This is quite dishonest, they make it seem like they develop the apps themselves. But they don't and they give no credit to the actual original apps. Librem Chat = Riot.im Librem Social = Mastodon (specifically the Tusky app) Librem Mail = K9 Mail Librem Tunnel = OpenVPN
This is quite dishonest, they make it seem like they develop the apps themselves. But they don't and they give no credit to the actual original apps. Librem Chat = Riot.im Librem Social = Mastodon (specifically the Tusky app) Librem Mail = K9 Mail Librem Tunnel = OpenVPN
But, the Social app looks exactly like a twitter screen shot, and the VPN looks identical to PIA’s iOS app.
The chat UI isn’t great, and the Mail app is even worse. They all look like apps you would find on F-Droid which are great, but I wouldn’t feel excited about paying monthly for an app suite that lacking in polish.
Their claims of millions of active users on each of the services also seem questionable. Maybe if they’re counting the total number of XMPP users I could see that.
Lastly, the framing of donating to what is by definition a for-profit company is off putting for me personally.
First, most users will never want to pay for a service, especially things like chat, email, social. What I mean by that is, the market is already there for social apps that allow completely free usage by using user data, think Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
Second, asking users to pay for a service at about $8/mo is pretty steep. Purism/librem aren't building all the apps themselves.
This is quite dishonest, they make it seem like they develop the apps themselves. But they don't and they give no credit to the actual original apps. Librem Chat = Riot.im Librem Social = Mastodon (specifically the Tusky app) Librem Mail = K9 Mail Librem Tunnel = OpenVPN
The alternative seems to be walled gardens.
Other companies do similar things, such as Fastmail which develops the open source IMAP server Cyrus [1]. I've been a happy Fastmail customer for years. Cyrus is still free for anyone to use even though Fastmail makes money from it.
You can't call something ethical without going into detail about what you mean. and:
Policy No Ads No Tracking We respect you
is not useful.
The value in ethics is in the conversation around what is ethical, not in a big, friendly "this is ethical" sticker.
This is as useful as "do no evil", and from the vague wording on the landing page, I'd imagine the people behind librem don't think google is very ethical right now.
First sentence is "Purism is a Social Purpose Corporation (SPC), which means we put social good above exploiting people". I've never heard of a SPC before (probably because I'm not from the US) so had to look it up. It seems it's still a for-profit corporation, just that it "enables, but does not require, considering social or environmental issues in decision making". Which means that "which means we put social good…
My layman's understanding is that it allows managers to choose their stated ethics over profits. Traditionally, investors could sue the company for not pursuing above all else.
The idea that "fiduciary duty" requires directors to pursue profit "above all else" is flatly false, and has led to untold amounts of misunderstanding and meaningless noise since whichever fool monkey first uttered it.
This is quite dishonest, they make it seem like they develop the apps themselves. But they don't and they give no credit to the actual original apps. Librem Chat = Riot.im Librem Social = Mastodon (specifically the Tusky app) Librem Mail = K9 Mail Librem Tunnel = OpenVPN
This is quite dishonest, they make it seem like they develop the apps themselves. But they don't and they give no credit to the actual original apps. Librem Chat = Riot.im Librem Social = Mastodon (specifically the Tusky app) Librem Mail = K9 Mail Librem Tunnel = OpenVPN
This is quite dishonest, they make it seem like they develop the apps themselves. But they don't and they give no credit to the actual original apps. Librem Chat = Riot.im Librem Social = Mastodon (specifically the Tusky app) Librem Mail = K9 Mail Librem Tunnel = OpenVPN
I hate ads and care about my privacy as much as anyone else here. However, the argument that a free ad-supported product X available to anyone in the world with an internet connection is less ethical than product Y which requires a monthly payment for access seems tenuous at best. Especially when you consider that the price is out of the question for those in developing countries.
This is a luxury purchase, not an ethical one.