Someone gets it

Date: 2014-09-25 04:29 pm (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
Posted on foundation list during the last election something along the lines of what you are saying now. At the end of the day users do care about privacy and security but they aren't likely to compromise usability or functionality to achieve it nor should they have to.

When you look at the story with gnome right now and even other platforms(gnome is not the exception here) there tends to be a trend towards integrating online services.

This requires the user to sign up to a third party service in order to unlock the full potential(functionality) of open source applications. This also requires the user to sign up to third party privacy policies which are in no way in the spirit of the free software movement to enable them to collaborate and communicate with other users.

The solutions to this problem from the fsf side of things have been inadequate, abisource, sparkleshare, etc tackle the problem from an isolated perspective instead of trying to tackle it on the platform level.

The only real project I found which understood this was EtoileOS, coreobject is exactly the type of framework gnome needs, unfortunately I don't think it will ever get it.

The attitude I have encountered has been dismissive and condescending, along the lines of who are you to say that things are inadequate when you are using google services.

This was happening behind my back but you can find it posted online by core members of the gnome development community.

It's one of the things that turned me away from this community, what turned me from being a polite gnome supporter to saying f it, the projects as good as dead.

I use google services because things are inadequate, there is no technical reason why they need to be that way. Coreobject can work over xmpp but it can also work over telehash.
Open source applications can feel just as integrated and comprehensive when compared to web based client/server alternatives, they don't need to involve a steep learning curve.
People can have it all but they aren't likely to, not with how things are viewed today.

Communication and collaboration is something that should be built in to applications, it shouldn't be something you achieve by integrating third party services.

From a users perspective there really isn't any point from a privacy or security perspective to using gnome over something like chromeos, at least with chromeos they have the collaboration and communication built in and not tacked on.

At the end of the day as much as native developers like to laugh at web developers, they are increasingly just developing platform constrained frontends to closed web services.

There needs to be a little less laughing and a little more innovating. The work done on design was really important but it doesn't go far enough.
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Matthew Garrett

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Power management, mobile and firmware developer on Linux. Security developer at Aurora. Ex-biologist. [personal profile] mjg59 on Twitter. Content here should not be interpreted as the opinion of my employer. Also on Mastodon.

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