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Librem One – A growing bundle of ethical services

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Re: Librem One – A growing bundle of ethical services

#51

Post by jclay »

abc-xyz wrote: post #41
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.

Maybe the term paywall isn’t the right one. I’m referring to the premise that you must pay the monthly fee to use the product and whether that is really any more ethical than ad supported products that are free for anyone in the world to use regardless of income.

Re: Librem One – A growing bundle of ethical services

#52

Post by dddw »

iagovar wrote: post #15
Klonoar wrote: post #7

Privacy isn't fixed by technical products, it needs to be fixed at a legal level. The existence of crypto near any product makes me immediately do a double take anymore, because there are tax implications there that you're kinda forcing on people. The design of these apps needs to be much more refined if you want to charge money for them. I'm usually willing to give a bit on it when it's for the right cause, but... t…

Exactly, I won't trust a company based in the US my privacy, no matter how cool it is. Maybe for stuff that requires convenience but not security. I don't trust any five eyes country neither. I currently use Swiss and Romanian services for my business, and while the experience is not as smooth as, say, Gmail or Digital Ocean, it's good enough.

swiss I understand, how are the privacy laws in Romania

Re: Librem One – A growing bundle of ethical services

#53

Post by groovybits »

robrtsql wrote: post #43

> 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.

PGP is a two-party system. The sender has a public/private keypair, and the recipient has a public/private keypair.

The sender encrypts a message with the sender's priv key and the recipient's pub key.

The recipient decrypts the message with the the sender's pub key and the recipient's priv key.

> Almost all of the transactional emails I have received (receipts, confirmation numbers, etc) are probably unencrypted, right?

Totally up to your email provider and a sender's email provider. Your provider may choose to send/accept email over TLS, which is also encrypted. Gmail, for example, does this.

Re: Librem One – A growing bundle of ethical services

#54

Post by ufo »

numbers wrote: post #23

Nice idea but a bit too utopian to work IMO. 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 a…

You aren't paying for the apps here, you are paying for the online services. $8 per month is not too different from what you would pay for a hosted email these days. IMO, the cost sounds reasonable once you consider that it is a bundle.

Re: Librem One – A growing bundle of ethical services

#55

Post by jclay »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #38
jclay wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree and this strikes me as odd as well. I really want to like this product and it’s squarely in the area of a service I would pay monthly for. 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…

Two things - you're not paying for apps in any way, they're FLOSS. You're paying for services - infrastructure, administration, "cloud" space etc. Also, while Purism is indeed a for-profit company, it's actually an interesting case since it's a Social Purpose Corporation - it's not there to maximize profits, but to maximize its social purpose. It legally can't do anything that would be at odds with its legally define…

I see your point, but as they’ve also created the apps under their brand it seems likely the monthly fee would also go towards (hopefully!) the continued improvement of those apps.

Re: Librem One – A growing bundle of ethical services

#56

Post by ufo »

jclay wrote: post #51
abc-xyz wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe the term paywall isn’t the right one. I’m referring to the premise that you must pay the monthly fee to use the product and whether that is really any more ethical than ad supported products that are free for anyone in the world to use regardless of income.

Ad supported products are not free, as you actually pay with your data. It is very insidious.

Re: Librem One – A growing bundle of ethical services

#57

Post by ocdtrekkie »

_red wrote: post #31
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #14

I like Librem, though I am a little concerned here. I prefer if hardware and services comes from different companies. Even well intentioned, it can be easy for a company to fall into vertical integration... Imagine a Librem 5 working best with their own service, and support for alternatives being a little weaker or less prioritized.

>I like Librem, though I am a little concerned here. I prefer if hardware and services comes from different companies I actually agree 100% with you, however I think at this stage of the market development, its enough to have a 3rd choice who's apps and services are open. Librem is facing the "Grandmother problem". In order for this concept to actually succeed, it eventually needs regular folks to buy it. Its not eno…

I definitely agree re: Grandmother problem, but I'd rather it configure services for you they aren't selling you. There's no shortage of services that already exist Librem could make easy to work with.

Re: Librem One – A growing bundle of ethical services

#58

Post by phicoh »

dmix wrote: post #47
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 purel…

If we want federated services, like matrix, to take off then we need to find a way to get users to pay for it.

Everybody is still free to set up a server at home or on a VPS. But there has to be a place you can point ordinary people to.

Re: Librem One – A growing bundle of ethical services

#59

Post by ocdtrekkie »

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

I'm not upset they rebranded them, but this comment is what I was looking for. I figured they didn't scratch built all of it, and wanted to know what services they were really selling.

Re: Librem One – A growing bundle of ethical services

#60

Post by nickelcitymario »

phicoh wrote: post #58
dmix wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 purel…

If we want federated services, like matrix, to take off then we need to find a way to get users to pay for it. Everybody is still free to set up a server at home or on a VPS. But there has to be a place you can point ordinary people to.

Yup! Privacy apps are borderline useless to me if the people I want to engage with don't use them. And probably 95% of the people in my social circle are not hackers/engineers who are comfortable managing their own servers.
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