this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2024
117 points (100.0% liked)
Free and Open Source Software
17919 readers
56 users here now
If it's free and open source and it's also software, it can be discussed here. Subcommunity of Technology.
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
A "privacy" company acquiring and centralizing various projects to be under its umbrella seems kind of worrisome to me even if it's done with pure intentions.
I find that fair, but at the same time, proton has a rocksolid history at this point. OFC they will likely add their features to it, and maybe remove some. But im the end its still open source and under gpl licence, so its not like proton cam change that unless they remove all other commits.
Chromium is still open source, as is Android to some extent. I get that the two companies (Google and Proton) are in completely different size classes, but something being open source doesn't necessarily mean it stays healthy. Sure people can fork it, but the issue tends to lie in continuous maintenance by volunteers against continuous maintenance by a large company that's constantly adding in anti-features along with desired ones.
I'm not necessarily saying Proton will go down that route, but trying to become big and bundled as a value proposition opens the door for that behavior once they get enough people locked into the ecosystem.
Chromium and AOSP are not good examples for what you're saying. Both Chromium and Android have thriving ecosystems of forks and alternatives based on them. Built on the work that Google is doing with them. So I really don't think those are good examples of applications that aren't healthy because you can just use a fork.
Yes, Google controls upstream, but there's no reason why you can't use downstream.As you said, it puts maintenance burden on the forks, but people are willing to do that. That's the thing.
EDIT: This is my off account, So, unfortunately, you'll have to take my word for it, but I did used to be part of an Android ROM team in the past and still do Android work private sector today.
Perhaps they are bad examples, but my point was more that I think those ecosystems thrive in spite of the company that owns the upstream at this point more than because of it. They did tremendously useful work getting the projects off the ground but it ostensibly seems like they get in the way more often than not; that said, I haven't done any open source work on either of the two. I'd be interested to hear your take, I could be pretty far off the mark.
Honestly my main examples I'd point to right now are situations like manifest V3 and Android nitpicks like the recent Bluetooth 2-tap change; don't get me wrong, they are easy to fork and have thriving ecosystems in terms of volunteer dedication, but those forks still primarily targeted towards technical users (with some exceptions) and companies selling devices like the Freedom Phone (and other, actually neat, useful, properly privacy focused devices which is awesome!). By far, however, most users are on the upstream branch due to "default choice" psychology and have to deal with the bullshit that's increasingly integrated into the proprietary elements that Google seems to be making harder and harder to separate from the open source ones. I suppose that's why education and getting the word out are all the more important though.
Could be the sensationalist end of the tech news cycle getting me spun up on an overall inaccurate view of things.
There is also the point I have to raise that security update support is always a very valuable asset that can be worth dealing with some downsides to get ahold of. I'm hoping a lot of those can be pulled into open source projects on more of a piecemeal basis where applicable?
I'd be happy to be proven wrong about my rudimentary assessment. I have enough things to be doomer about and honestly it would be nice to have one or two fewer!
Working with android can be a bit of a pain for sure. I'm only talking about android here since that's all I've tested, so don't apply what I am saying to chromium, Android and Chromium are two seperate projects, by two separate teams. but in the end it's important to realize that google has actually needs for these devices. As long as you work within the bounds of needs it's actually not that hard to actually work with. Android has a LOT of stuff for sure.
Android actually allows you to configure most things (granted the documentation is absolutely horrid, Grep my beloved). It is true that most android phones are running proprietary stuff, but this isn't really any fault of google. Google has gone to fairly great lengths to make AOSP a fairly open ecosystem. Nearly every rom is heavily customized as per customers requirements. AOSP can actually run on most hardware fairly easily. Hell it even works just fine on the vanilla kernel (Waydroid for instance). The Issue is that it's nearly impossible to market consumer devices with only FOSS/AOSP stuff, the margins on phones are actually terrible. The biggest issue is finding a phone that can accommodate the more open stuff, not the issue with google pushing crap. In the end Google is making devices for people who will fight tooth and nail to grab the gun to shoot themselves in the foot. A lot of their motivations are based on that. But doing your own AOSP is still easy enough. Just need hardware for it.
Even from the "all your eggs in one basket" kind of perspective it does feel worrisome, not to mention that i am unsure about this dilution of their focus on many apps being helpful, I'd rather have them focus on very few but rock solid and maintained services instead of going with the Google "we do everything" way to do things
The phrase Jack of all trades master of none really only applies to people. A company can just hire more people when it has more products.
Google's issue is not that they're "big" it's that they've failed to truly innovate and invest in anything in years. The current leadership kills anything that isn't an instant money maker despite the majority of the company's profitable products taking years to become profitable. They're also in a weird spot because their "magic" was always free services in exchange for advertising money and that's a model that's come under attack and been replicated to death by competitors.