Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Librem One – A growing bundle of ethical services

librem.one

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 136 posts

Re: Librem One – A growing bundle of ethical services

#41

Post by abc-xyz »

jclay wrote: post #30

I find the “ethical” framing around this to be rather problematic. 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…

I really don't get your point.. user tracking for the purpose of serving ads (or any other purpose for that matter) and putting up paywalls (that allow certain users/bots to crawl content) is both unethical.. why does it matter which of the two is the most unethical? You can easily have ethical ads and paywalls, e.g. duckduckgo.

Re: Librem One – A growing bundle of ethical services

#43

Post by robrtsql »

> Librem Mail. Main Features: Safe (We delete unencrypted emails after 30 days)

I don't understand encrypted email very much at all. Is encryption on emails that I have received controlled by the sender? Almost all of the transactional emails I have received (receipts, confirmation numbers, etc) are probably unencrypted, right? This doesn't sound desirable.

Re: Librem One – A growing bundle of ethical services

#44

Post by mindslight »

1023bytes wrote: post #16

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 the standard playbook of every Surveillance as as Service business though - package up a bunch of preexisting Free software, design a proprietary closed-world frontend, and market the hell out of it.

So while you have a point, I think "quite dishonest" is a bit too much condemnation. The stack is so big, with the majority of energy already being siphoned off by SaaS bundlers, it's basically impossible to rebuild the entire stack anti-surveillance-like as one big release. Rather we're going to end up with many approaches, each trying to solve a bit of the problem. The bit of the problem being solved here is really the popularization angle - making an easy touchstone recommendation for someone who is interested in privacy but would/could/should never self-host.

I quickly picked up that the Chat was Matrix, and assumed the tunnel was openvpn or wireguard (designing a new protocol would be a priori cryptographic incompetence). So perhaps constructive feedback to better summarize the underlying software for people "in the know" is worthwhile. But writing off the actual value-add of the project, the productization itself, mainly just results in hindering the ability of the Free community to market.

Re: Librem One – A growing bundle of ethical services

#45

Post by [deleted] »

cblades wrote: post #25

This is really frustrating, and basically the exact same thread as happened a while back with another list of "ethical alternatives". 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…

[deleted]

Re: Librem One – A growing bundle of ethical services

#46

Post by adontz »

I think what we really need, the enabler of migration is, and always was, decent collaborative office suite. Acceptable collaboration level evolves over time, that's true, but otherwise requirements are the same.

There is no point is free/ethical/etc file storage if I still have to use Microsoft Office to edit files, which is neither free nor very collaborative. Text editors are relatively easy to replace. Google Sheets are really really hard to replace. Even Microsoft Excel seems somewhat inferior to Google Sheets to me now.

Re: Librem One – A growing bundle of ethical services

#47

Post by dmix »

nickelcitymario wrote: post #40

Lots of great criticism on this thread. Lots of great reasons to maybe stay away from Purism. However... What I personally think is really interesting here is the bundle. I don't want to pay $10/month for a Twitter clone. I don't want to pay it for VPN. I don't want to pay it for email, or file storage, or contact manager, or payment system. But as a bundle? $10/month to actually solve all of my digital privacy conce…

Agreed, just OSS software on it's own is great but these products need proper marketing and delivery.

If Purism is offering clean and transparent connections to services backing them combined with some sort of delivery (update) + support mechanism, that is already far better than just telling someone to download 5-6 apps + subscribe to 3-4 services (VPN, email server, backup server, etc).

It's not as ideal as a purely decentralized, multi-party system for securities sake, but it's better than what 99% of people are going to be using otherwise - in the real world.

Re: Librem One – A growing bundle of ethical services

#48

Post by mxuribe »

nickelcitymario wrote: post #40

Lots of great criticism on this thread. Lots of great reasons to maybe stay away from Purism. However... What I personally think is really interesting here is the bundle. I don't want to pay $10/month for a Twitter clone. I don't want to pay it for VPN. I don't want to pay it for email, or file storage, or contact manager, or payment system. But as a bundle? $10/month to actually solve all of my digital privacy conce…

Agreed, the bundle ("...to actually solve all of my digital privacy concerns...") is definitely the cool part in all of this!

Re: Librem One – A growing bundle of ethical services

#49

Post by seba_dos1 »

Boulth wrote: post #35
1023bytes wrote: post #16

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

Yes. It struck me as odd too seeing familiar apps rebranded. Does Librem publish source code of their modifications?

It's legally bound to release all its software as FLOSS: https://puri.sm/about/social-purpose/
Post reply on HN